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Urban Histories of Toronto and Its RegionThu, 24 May 2018 19:27:31 +0000en-CAhourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8(Not) Guilty? The Trial of Carrie Davies: Intersectionality and Female Crime in Early Twentieth Century Torontohttp://www.developmentoftoronto.com/not-guilty-the-trial-of-carrie-davies-intersectionality-and-female-crime-in-early-twentieth-century-toronto/
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Toronto Daily Star February 9 1915

February 8th 1915 proved to be the start of a memorable sequence of events in the city of Toronto. Carrie Davies, an 18-year-old domestic servant working in the home of Charles Albert ‘Bert’ Massey, shot and killed her employer as he arrived home. She did not try to conceal her crime, as upon her arrest she immediately proclaimed her guilt.[1] A coroner’s inquest found that Davies had “feloniously, wilfully, and of her malice aforethought kill and slay Charles Albert Massey.”[2] The subsequent criminal trial found Davies not guilty of murdering her employer. How did this happen? In her confession, Davies maintained that she had shot and killed Massey because he had ruined her.[3] Toronto at the turn of the century bathed in Victorian morals, upholding values of chivalry, duty, and virtue. The First World War only heightened these themes. The defense painted Davies as a woman who had been protecting herself, her values, and her virtue from the depravity of her male employer. For the most part, the prosecution could not challenge these claims. Davies’s case is remarkable for two reasons. First, her victim was a member of ‘the’ Massey family – a great-grandson of Hart Massey. Bert Massey had met his end at the hands of his domestic help because he had made improper advances on her, a scandalous story for any family. Second, was that Davies’s gender, race, and class all played a vital part in her acquittal. For Carrie Davies, and many other women who found themselves embroiled in legal matters in the in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gender, race, and class were three vital factors in determining their guilt or innocence, especially in case that could result in capital punishment.

Legal cases represent a specific period in history as they “illuminate” the importance of intersectionality – the ways categories of gender, ethnicity or race, and class interact in specific situations.[4] Joan Scott suggests that sometimes these categories cannot be analysed equally or with parity, as they are not rigid categories that can be equally transplanted from one situation to the next.[5] Constructions of these categories in Canada, and in Toronto, resulted in a particular shaping of victimhood, as well as the resulting punishment of women. Interpretations of victimhood that are constructed or influenced by the categories are relayed through the rulings of judges and juries.[6] Women in the early twentieth century were often represented as victims of patriarchal systems of injustice. Unfortunately, this was not a result of the ways women wanted to be perceived, but instead by the men who were responsible for their defence, prosecution, judgement, and sentencing. This concept is known as “chivalric justice.”[7] Carolyn Strange’s definition of chivalric justice suggests that it was perpetuated by “female and male stereotypes by upholding the ideals of feminine frailty and masculine heroism,” which in turn “reaffirms the class and race privileges of men who wield the power to protect and option to pardon.”[8] This concept is essential in understanding why Davies’s case ended in her acquittal. The coroner’s inquest proved that a crime had taken place. There was no doubt that Carrie had shot Massey – as there were several witnesses, and she herself had admitted it. On February 16th the jury in the coroner’s inquest came to the conclusion that “Charles A. Massey came to his death on February 8th as a result of a shot which the jury believed to have been fired by Carrie Davies, and that Carrie Davies did, therefore, feloniously and with malice aforethought, kill and slay the said C.A. Massey.”[9] The evidence presented at the criminal trial was meant to prove Davies’s motive and intent to kill her employer. Instead, when the trial concluded on February 27th , Davies had been found not guilty.

Picture of 169 Walmer Road from The Toronto Daily Star February 9 1915. The caption reads, “The scene of last night’s shooting tragedy is shown above. Edward Pelletier, newsboy, and sole witness of the murder, says Mr. Massey had reached the verandah when Carrie Davies, the domestic, fired the first shot. He staggered down the steps as she fired again and along his own walk to the street where he fell dead.”

The events of February 8th 1915 are clear and unattested. At 6:15pm Massey, aged 34, arrived home. As he reached the doorway of his house at 169 Walmer Road, Davies shot at him. He ran back down the walkway, when Davies shot at him again – this time killing him.[10] Ernest Pelletier, the newspaper boy who had just collected money from Massey for the next month’s delivery, witnessed the crime.[11] Davies was arrested shortly after, and made a full confession of the crime, including the circumstances leading up to the shooting.[12] Her questioning with Sergeant Kennedy shortly thereafter provided the motive behind the murder. Davies stated:

“[Massey] took advantage of me yesterday and [I] thought he was going to do the same today. He caught me on Sunday afternoon and I ran upstairs and then he called me to make his bed and I obeyed and as soon as I went into his bedroom he said ‘this is a nice bed’ and then he caught me and I pushed him aside and ran upstairs and locked my door while I dressed and then went out and told my sister.”[13]

This admission became part of the defense for the young woman, and would later be expanded on. She said, “he caught me by both hands, around the waist and side and said he liked little girls. Then he kissed me and I struggled, but he kissed me again.” Additionally, Massey gave Davies a ring as a gift for her service at the dinner party earlier in the week.[14] The duty she felt in protecting her virtue resonated with all those involved in the case, as well as the general public. In the “Voice of the People” section of the Toronto Daily Star readers showed their support for Davies. One reader wrote, “I believe our country is blessed with many such virtuous working girls, with such a keen sense of honour. We may yet hope that a girl or woman could go through her life in Canada at least, in office, factory, or domestic life, without that fear of man, that I fear too often rightfully exists at this present time.”[15] An anonymous reader of the Evening Telegram, who later revealed herself to be Mrs. J. W. Drummond, wrote to the editor suggesting that a fund be started to pay for Davies’s legal fees.[16] She sympathized with Davies, and assumed that others would too.[17] The Evening Telegram as a whole proved to be sympathetic to Davies.

Torontonians stood by Davies throughout her legal battle. The Council of Women had attempted to raise funds for Davies’s defense, but Davies’s sister refused to accept their funding. The Bedfordshire Fraternal Organization stepped in established a legal fund to help Davies pay for her defense. Those asking for donation sought to appeal to “every Englishman, Welshman, and soldier, to every British subject,” simply asking to, “give the price of a cigar or a glass of beer and not to let this scandal be upon them of a poor friendless girl condemned because she was too poor to bring out evidence in her own favor.”[18] Donations were sent into the Telegram signed by names such as “One Who Knows” and “Another English Working Girl” highlighting the fact that other Torontonians identified with Davies. Her experience with her employer would have not been an isolated incident within the Massey household, and by signing a donation as “One Who Knows” and “Another English Working Girl” point to a shared experience amongst other women.

Toronto Daily Star, February 9 1915

Davies had arrived in Canada when she was 16 years old, two years prior to the murder. She had been employed for the Massey’s since her arrival. Her sister, a Mrs. Fairchild, also lived in Toronto, but her mother and other siblings had remained in Bedfordshire England. Davies’s employment in Toronto in the household of the Massey’s secured the financial stability of her family back home.[19] Due to the rapid urbanization of Toronto, it was no surprise that it attracted more young single female workers than any other Canadian city in the early 20th century.[20] Many domestics were immigrants, with a significant portion of them being from the British Isles. This line of work was low paying, with and average salary of $120 in 1901.[21] In the late nineteenth century, domestic service was the largest single occupational category for Canadian women with 41% of working women employed in this field.[22] But, during this time occupations of working class women began to shift. Though domestics still occupied the largest single occupational category, nearly 50% of women worked in workshops, stores, and factories.[23] By 1911, 27.1% of women in the workforce were domestic servants.[24] Yet, domestic service was still seen as a much more respectable job for the working class due to its existing within the domestic and private spheres.[25]

Domestic service, unlike work in the public sector, had the potential to be completely isolated as many women worked as ‘live in’ servants. Due to this, they were often at a higher risk of being subjected to sexual harassment and assault by their employers.[26] Constance Backhouse points to the exposure of domestic servants in stating, “the vulnerability of domestic servants to sexual exploitation was widely understood. The culprits were typically their masters, or male relatives of their masters.”[27] Davies, who had previously never had a complaint about her employers, had discovered one of the harsh realities that women working faced. Backhouse continues her argument with “the long hours of work and lack of privacy were such that female servants were almost continuously accessible.”[28] Massey made advances on Davies while his wife was away, meaning that Davies had become even more accessible to her employer during the days leading up to his murder.[29] As a result of the Davies case, moral reformers in the form of the Canadian Vigilance Association requested that the Council of Women and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union meet for the purpose of forming organizations that would better serve in protecting domestic servants.[30] This particular intersection of class, gender, and ethnicity allowed for the defense to depict Davies in a very specific light. She was a working class woman who supported her family back home. Domestic service was a respectable and traditional occupation, and was mostly held by British women. She fit the mould of the ideal working class girl.

Headline from The Evening Telegram, February 27 1915

The legal system in Canada in the early 20th century began to carve out a space for women in the criminal justice system – they along with children began being tried in separate courts.[31] In 1913 Toronto sponsored a Women’s Court, which happened to be the first in the nation. Both the National Council of Women and the Young Women’s Christian Association backed the establishment of a separate court. This court would provide a “practical application of the standard of morals” creating a distinct relationship between morals and gender.[32] Women were held to piety, faithfulness, and chastity, and the Women’s Court was designed by reformers to uphold these values.[33] Strange argues that “advocates anticipated that separate women’s courts, with the public excluded, would allow magistrates to distinguish between innocent victims and evil minded women.”[34] Mrs. A. M. Huestis, president of the Local Council of Women pointed to the fact that of the over 40,000 cases brought before the courts between 1913 and early 1915, many had been brought through the Women’s Court allowing for the female prisoners “a little of the privacy to which they [were] entitled.”[35] Women’s groups like the Women’s Council advocated for ways to help the ‘fallen’ women, which often included sentences other than jail time.[36] Davies was arraigned at the Women’s court on February 9th, being charged with murder.[37]

The Evening Telegram, February 27 1915

An important part in understanding how gender, class, and race impacted Davies’s case is in comparing how these categories are seen and manipulated in other cases. The trial of Robert Brown played out simultaneously with Davies’s, with Chief Justice William Mulock presiding over both cases. Brown had shot his wife Evelyn (who later died) as well as Norman Smith (who lived) because he suspected Smith of sleeping with his wife. Although Brown was cleared of killing his wife, he pleded guilty to shooting with intent to cause grievous bodily harm in the shooting of Smith.[38] Chief Justice Mulock cited “the apparent cold blooded deliberation” which Brown had taken in shooting Smith, and also used the charge which Brown was acquitted of, to further support his reasoning for sentencing.[39] In accordance to Section 241 of the Canadian Criminal Code, Brown was sentenced to life in prison.[40] Though the court believed that Brown had attempted to murder Smith, Brown attested that he did not intend to kill Smith – if he had intended to kill Smith he would have “shot him in the head,” instead of the leg.[41] This case highlights how men were dealt with in the court, and how their crimes often centred on brutality, providing a base as to how murder cases were usually handled.

The deliberation of Davies’s crime is debatable. Massey had not been home for the better part of the day, nor had he made any advances on her since the prior incident. She had taken the time to find and load the gun, and then wait for her employer to come home. The defense, however, claimed that “it was a sudden impulse, prompted by the presence of the man as he came up the walk. The pressure was too great, and she broke down. There was no intention to kill or injure.” and that “her only desire was to protect herself against him.”[42] The jury was also fully capable of finding Davies guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter, yet many times all male juries found themselves upholding aspects of “chivalric justice.” Ernest E. A. DuVernet, the Crown Counsel, suggested that Davies “overreacted” by shooting Massey, and that would at least qualify her for manslaughter.[43]

Hartley H. Dewart, Davies’s defense during her criminal trial, wanted to highlight that even though Davies had committed a crime she was still innocent and honourable. He was quoted as saying:

“You are accustomed to cases of murder in which sheer brutality plays so important a part. You are accustomed to cases where sordid lusts or love of gain supply the motive. You are accustomed to cases where jealousy, revenge, outraged confidence of the revengeful feelings of a woman despoiled of her virtue have led to the crime. [But never before had there been such a charge] against an innocent and honourable girl, fighting against unequal odds and a treacherous assailant.”[44]

A particular understanding of the singularity of Davies’s case was noted even in 1915. The “revengeful feelings of a woman despoiled of her virtue” are a likely reference to the Clara Ford trial of 1895 in which Dewart served as Crown Counsel. In this particular case, Ford shot and killed Frank Westwood who she claimed had taken advantage of her. Similar to Davies, she waited several days after her altercation with the man before killing him. She allegedly dressed as a man, visited the home of her victim, and killed him when he answered the door. Ford’s defense used an argument similar to that of the Davies defence, where she killed for the sake of her virtue.[45] This ultimately worked, and Ford was acquitted of the charges. A significant point of difference was the ways race and ethnicity were used as a tool in both trials. Ford was a biracial woman, and negative stereotypes of her black heritage were used by the prosecution to suggest that she was brutish and uncivilized.[46] Davies was a white English woman in a time where Toronto’s population was mostly white and Anglo-Saxon. Race or ethnicity in Canada was a construct of various qualities including biology and culture.[47] Dewart served as the crown attorney during Ford’s case, and took no issue in linking Ford’s race with her crime. For Davies, her ethnicity was played up due to the wartime climate. Upon her acquittal, Dewart was quoted as saying, “you can make a parallel between the soldiers in the trenches and the girl in her humble domestic capacity. It is no more murder or malice than it is for our brave troops to defence the honour of the empire.”[48] The argument was made that supporting Davies was akin to supporting the troops overseas as they were both doing their duty to preserve all that is good in the world.[49]

Headline from The Toronto Sunday World, February 28 1915

Ten years prior to Davies’s case, was the of Alexander and Ethel Martin. They were both charged in the death of their seven month old son whose body had washed ashore near Centre Island. The couple were both charged with the murder, but only Alexander Martin was found guilty.[50] His wife’s defense claimed that due to the fact that she was the child’s mother, she could not have possibly killed him, and most likely tried to prevent the crime. Furthermore, testimony suggested that though Ethel Martin had been with her husband at the time of the child’s death, and concealed the death up until the discovery of the body, it was her husband who actually committed the crime and therefore he should be the one to serve the punishment.[51] Both Alexander and Ethel Martin faced the death penalty for their crime, but Ethel Martin’s gender was a factor in saving her from the gallows – a fate which her husband met shortly after being found guilty. In January 1905 Alexander Martin was hanged for his crime.[52] This returns to the suggestion that in cases where the death penalty was a potential option, if a woman was on trial the defense and the jury would take any small thing into consideration to avoid a guilty sentence. Though there was always the possibility of having the sentence commuted to life in prison, or for the prisoner to be pardoned of their crime, potentially sentencing a woman to death was not a light task.

Headline from The Evening Telegram, February 15 1915.

Most importantly, Davies’s case was a matter of life and death. The Canadian Criminal Code of 1892 established that “everyone who commits murder is guilty of an indictable offence and shall on conviction thereof, be sentenced to death.”[53] Even if Davies was to be found guilty of a lesser sentence of manslaughter she would have faced life imprisonment.[54] The coroner’s inquest proved that a crime had been committed, and upon being brought to a criminal trial in the Assize court, the responsibility of the Crown was to prove the intent behind the crime. The jury had the power to send Davies to the gallows. Even finding her guilty of the lesser sentence of manslaughter had the potential to send her to jail for the rest of her life. From confederation to the elimination of the death penalty in 1976, almost 1,500 people had been sentenced to death. The punishment of death was not necessarily a ‘death sentence’ per se. Petitions for the sentence to be commuted to life in prison, or a complete pardon could save convicted criminals from hanging. 58 women had been sentenced to death until 1867 to 1976, but only 11 women were actually executed in Canada.[55]

Even with a supposed crackdown on smaller moral crimes, women made up a relatively small percentage of total arrests. Between 1911 and 1919, women only made up 7.6% of arrests in Toronto. Most of these reflect crimes like drunkenness, theft, and vagrancy. In 1913 and 1916 less serious charges accounted for almost 90% of the total charges laid against women.[56] During these same two years, only 50% and 57% of women respectively, were actually convicted of their crimes. A further 55% of women in 1913 and 36% in 1916 were sentenced to jail time. 1919 saw a conviction rate of 98%, but only 3 women were sentenced to time in local jails. A large percentage of women who were convicted of crimes were sentenced to reformatory institutions instead of jails. Though many of these reformatory institutions are remembered for causing irreparable damage to the women that were incarcerated, the establishment of a separate space for female criminals in order to re-instil accepted morals highlights the role that gender played in the punishment of criminals.[57]

In looking at the cases that were tried in the Assize Court in 1915 of York County, it is evident how singular the Davies case is. 34 cases were tried during 1915, 3 of which centred around female defendants – Davies, Felicia Da Veolpe, and Polnia Romincheu. Da Veople was charged with wounding Leonardo Liczi who had been previously been charged with libel as he had been spreading rumors about her being a prostitute.[58] Though Da Veolpe was ultimately found guilty of wounding Liczi, she was handed a suspended sentence as she had been provoked to attack him.[59] Romincheu was charged with the typically female crime of concealing a birth. In total, between 1911 and 1919, 4 women were arrested for concealment of birth in Toronto.[60] Out of the 19 people charged with murder, manslaughter, attempted murder, or intent to cause grievous bodily harm in 1915 (all crimes which attempt to end the life of another adult human being), Davies was the only woman.[61]

Headline from The Toronto Daily Star, February 27 1915

The case of Carrie Davies provides a unique snapshot of Toronto at the beginning of the twentieth century. Factors like gender, class, and race or ethnicity are present in every trial, but the unique combination of the factors for Davies served in acquitting her of the serious charge of murder. Her virtue and good reputation solidified her as a respectable woman, as did her employment. Her story of coming to Toronto in order to work and support her family also established the responsibility she felt towards her family. In addition to how she maintained herself, Davies was also a white British woman in a predominantly Anglo-Saxon city. All these different pieces of Davies’s life were able to fit together in a particular way that secured her acquittal. Many of the men involved in the trial, including Judge Mulock, were noted to have been emotional as the verdict was read – a verdict which only took half an hour to reach.[62] Davies’s acquittal represented the triumph of traditional moral and values in the changing times of the First World War. Her gender, her race, and her class were all determining factors in securing her freedom. Though these factors were present for many other women who interacted with the Canadian criminal justice system, Davies had the support of the city behind her. Her only wish after her acquittal was to be able to “be back at work [and] that she could forget it all and be able to go home to England to see her mother.”[63]

[52] “Petition for Martin,” The Toronto Daily Star, January 28 1905, 1.; “An Appeal to the King,” The Globe, March 10 1905, 12.

[53] Criminal Code, 1892, c C-29 s 231.

[55] Lorraine Gadoury and Antonio Lechasseur, “Persons Sentenced to Death in Canada, 1867-1976: An Inventory of Case Files in the Fonds of the Department of Justice,” Government Archives Division National Archives of Canada, 22.

Toronto Harbour Commission drawing of Bold Concept 1 with the Toronto Island Airport expanded and moved south of the Toronto Islands. Harbour City is in yellow. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 200, Series 1465, File 291, Item 6.

In 1968 the federally appointed Toronto Harbour Commission (THC), desperate to generate revenue after the dream of a burgeoning Port of Toronto caused by the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway had foundered, drafted a visionary master plan for the development of the Central Toronto Waterfront called “A Bold Concept.” Launched without public consultation, the scheme sought to create a modernist “Harbour City” on newly created and repurposed land in the western portion of Toronto harbour. A necessary element of the plan was to relocate the Toronto Island Airport to a spur of landfilled breakwater called the Leslie Street Spit and transform it into an airport capable of accepting large commercial jets.

The airport proposal sparked a furious reaction from the residents of Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood, adjacent to the proposed airport. The citizens, a new coalition of traditional left-wing activists and conservationists opposed to development and middle-class house owners who did not want their home life disrupted by airport noise, joined together as ForWard 9. Protest meetings of more than 500 citizens shocked city planners and the technocrats of the THC and became another spark in an Toronto urban protest movement that was to merge with activists citywide and result in the election of the city’s first reform council under Mayor David Crombie in 1972.

But what was the legacy of this little-known episode in Toronto’s civic history and to what extent did the controversy over the Leslie Street Spit airport, which sparked the protests and the political coalition that produced ForWard 9, act as a catalyst, along with the Stop Spadina movement occurring at the same time, for the city-wide urban reform movement that resulted in the election of a transformative Reform Council four years later?

Until ForWard, 9 a new generation of Toronto citizen activists fought controversial urban developments such as Trefann Court (1966), Don Vale (1967) and Stop Spadina (1968) using a tool-kit of raucous public meetings and spirited opposition in Toronto City Council by a rump of reformist city councillors. None of the battles benefited from citizen participation in the planning bodies that made the actual decisions on these projects. In the tumultuous month of May 1970, for the first time, ForWard 9 succeeded in placing a representative on the planning committee for the proposed airport. It was a move that set a precedent and would cement the integration of citizen participation in Toronto urban planning decisions for generations to come.

The reason the Toronto Harbour Commission placed so large a bet and fought so hard to establish an international airport on what was to become the Leslie Street Spit (The Spit) can be traced to the agency’s foundations. At the beginning of the twentieth century Toronto’s waterfront had been neglected and mismanaged. It was a health hazard, increasingly silted in and of declining use for shipping. Toronto citizens laid the blame for the waterfront’s sorry condition on the city government’s pervasive climate of cronyism. The Toronto Board of Trade, in league with the federal government, set up an arm’s-length agency, above politics, to manage the waterfront and gave the body extraordinary powers. “There is no doubt the establishment of the Toronto Harbour Commission was a defining moment in the history of Toronto’s waterfront. From its establishment in 1911 to its dissolution and restructuring in 1999, the commission created more than eight hundred hectares of new land spanning nearly twenty kilometers of shore line and, in the process, fundamentally reshaped both the terrestrial and jurisdictional terrain of Toronto’s waterfront.” [1]

But as Desfor et al. note, this power created “baked-in” problems of accountability and funding that were to dog the THC for a century. [2] By design the Commission was self-financing. Its revenues came from shipping service fees, development tariffs for building on newly dredged land and, in later years, user fees from the Toronto Island Airport built in 1937. “Although the commission was quite successful in producing industrial land, its track record in attracting firms to locate in the Port Industrial District was less impressive.”[3] By 1929 the THC had created about 182 hectares of land, but had leased only 29 per cent of it. In fact, “ the industrial wave of waterfront land development that had begun with the 1912 plan was largely spent by the end of the 1940s.”[4] The THC was struggling fiscally.

Similarly, hoped-for new revenues from the St. Lawrence Seaway, opened in 1959, failed to materialize. As Reeves notes, “as early as 1966, the THC’s Seaway-related work was being viewed with scepticism. Containerization, rail and truck completion, federal transport policies and the behaviour of various shipping conferences inspired a downward spiral for the port. Toronto’s total and coastwise general cargo tonnages peaked in 1969, overseas tonnages reached their zenith in 1972.”[5]

Even THC plans for The Spit, which was to be the breakwater for a vast new Outer Harbour to replace and supplement Toronto’s old Inner Harbour, were appearing unrealistic. “While plans had been formalized to create an outer harbour in 1967, it was clear by then that additional capacity was not needed.“ [6] By the 1960s the fiscal strains on the THC and its ability to fix them via new revenues from new land development fees were further compromised by the agency’s lack of accountability, which had been “baked in” from its foundation. According to Desfor et al., “The development powers of the new commission were clear. But, accountability of [the THC] to Torontonians, the City and the national government…is a complicated matter.” [7] One of the complications was that “…in some important ways commissions are not intended to be accountable.” [8] They were “blue ribbon panels” and the ideology current among civic reform movements of the early twentieth century “advocated establishing semi-independent agencies composed of the city’s best and brightest citizens, who would direct municipal government.” [9] This was in reaction to the corruption and self-dealing prevalent in North American “clientalist” civic governments of that era, including Toronto’s.

Gene Desfor et. al. conclude that the flaws in the THC mandate represented a sort of original sin that created “…nearly a century of antagonism, most particularly between the City of Toronto and the commission, but also among other organizations with competing waterfront mandates.” [10]

Into this fraught situation, by the mid-1960s, the Commissioners knew they needed to produce a major financial breakthrough. They thought they had it when as part of the THC contribution to Metropolitan Toronto’s 1967 “The Waterfront Plan for the Metropolitan Planning Area” they were asked to produce a complementary report on the future of the central waterfront and in particular THC’s money-losing Toronto Island Airport.

In January, 1968 the THC released “A Bold Concept: A Conceptual Plan for the development of the city of Toronto Waterfront,” described as “A bold new concept …it is Tomorrow’s Waterfront Today…It is living; it is commerce; it is fun; it is beauty; it is coordinated and balanced.”[11] The most radical part of the proposal was Harbour City. Extending from the foot of Yonge Street to Bathurst Quay and onto Toronto Island, it was to offer “a form of urban living virtually unique on the continent, housing 50,000 people on a 400-acre site…linked by internal waterways, pedestrian pathways and automobile routes.”[12]

The first iteration, Bold Concept I, proposed moving Toronto Island Airport to a new larger site built on landfill off Gibraltar Point south of the existing islands. The plan called for the construction of “A 7000-foot length of runway… adequate to accommodate 90-passenger inter-city jet aircraft of the DC-9 type…A second 4000-foot runway is planned for the convenience of light aircraft.”[13]

For the Commissioners it made perfect sense. They would relocate the deficit-strapped Island Airport, whose revenues were restricted by the fact that the THC could not build a road to the airport from downtown, to The Spit which would be accessible by road and large enough to attract commercial jets and the lucrative landing right contracts they would generate. Meanwhile the freed-up airport lands could become Harbour City and be subject to lucrative new development fees.

When federal officials argued that flight paths of jets landing at the Gibraltar Point airport would conflict with planes landing at Malton Airport in Toronto’s northwest, the THC issued Bold Concept II, which proposed moving the new airport to The Spit off of Toronto’s eastern beaches.

Bold Concept II moved the airport to the Leslie Street Spit, south of Toronto’s Eastern Beaches. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 200, Series 1465, File 291, Item 14.

As was standard practice the THC circulated the plans, including the airport relocation, to a tight circle of technocrats and planners in the four levels of government effected (federal, provincial, Metro Toronto and City of Toronto), but not to the public. This was not surprising. Top-down civic planning was the order of the day, especially for the THC. Aside from the lack of accountability written into its mandate, the THC had become gun shy of public scrutiny. The reason dates to 1922 when the so-called Denton inquiry, a royal commission into allegations of political favouritism, construction incompetence and corruption focused on the THC for two years. “Although no criminal charges were laid, the Harbour Commission became defensive, and ‘retreated into their board rooms’ with little concern for providing public accountability.” [14]

Until the late 1960s however, the top-down system had worked well. But things were changing around the world and particularly in Toronto. “…Toronto in the late 1960s was immersed in acrimonious debates about its future, as citizen groups rose up to oppose the demolition and rebuilding of old neighbourhoods.”[15]

The new civic oppositional alliances were an uneasy coalition of two groups, according to Richard White, “New Left political radicals who had it in for capitalist ‘developers’ and who strove to empower local communities in their struggle against the technocratic state, and middle-class homeowners…who wanted to enjoy their comfortable urban homes and protect their urban property values.”[16]

Citizens reacted against what James C. Scott has called a high modernist urban vision among city planners and applied to urban developments, a doctrine of authoritarian high modernism aimed at harnessing the benefits of technical and scientific progress. In this view, “scientific knowledge constituted a supreme authority, and politics were consequently downplayed or excluded altogether. There was a single, best solution to any problem – usually a large-scale project that required a public authority to fund and orchestrate the plan.” [17]

Civic activists rejected this approach and “challenged authorities with an alternative vision for cities that prioritized safeguarding the urban environment by preserving communities, preventing environmental degradation, and promoting public transit.” [18]

According to John Sewell, former Toronto mayor (1979-1980) and leading 1960s civic activist, “Growing numbers of people [in Toronto] questioned their political representatives and no longer accepted city planners as impartial experts. These emerging citizen activists were typically upper-middle-class white-collar workers, often intellectuals, who possessed the necessary political and media savvy to advocate effectively.” [19]

Still, as Kevin Brushett cautions, urban activism was not entirely new in Toronto in the 1960s. Civic action against “top-down” urban renewal planning was evident in the late 1940s, but most efforts at collective action and change were ineffective, crippled by a civic climate of anti-Communism.[20]

The relative success of Toronto’s new civic activism was due in part to the building of strong coalitions but also a new atmosphere of societal change seen in events like Expo 67, the election of Pierre Trudeau in 1968 and the evolution of counter-culture elements in centers like Toronto’s Yorkville. And change was not just occurring in large centers like Toronto.

Describing a citizen’s movement to manage and slow development in the late 1960s in the Toronto-area village of Bronte, Steve Penfold details the conflict: “Residents pressed their claims on the municipal government, adopting much the same rhetoric as the citizen participation movement sweeping through municipalities across Canada. By the late 1960s, diverse constellations of community organizers, political radicals, ratepayers associations, historical preservations, anti-highway activists and not-in-my-backyard homeowners pressed municipal governments on a number of common issues.”[21]

Sewell notes that in 1969 Toronto was poised for change. “The city had grown and changed since the end of the Second World War, but its decision makers at city hall seemed musty, unimaginative and out of touch. They believed in clearing the past out of the way to welcome in the future…. They didn’t listen to what people in the neighbourhoods had to say.”[22]

Writing in 1971, at the height of the citizen insurrections in Toronto, activist and University of Toronto professor Alan Powell described the underlying contextual problem in Toronto in the late 1960s, arguing the system of metropolitan government in Toronto laboured under “the myth that ‘old is bad,’” and that the political and planning establishment operated under a set of assumptions that “was predicated on the continual growth of suburbs and the death of the working class residential core [of Toronto.]” [23]

The new citizen activists mistrusted the assumptions of planners and viewed comprehensive urban plans they generated with distain. Urban planning critic Jane Jacobs, who lived the later part of her life in Toronto, dismissively referred to them as “Master plans (both the name and the concept reeking of hubris) accompanied by rules regulations, standards and subsidies…”[24]

Ken Greenberg, a Toronto planning consultant, who as a young student lived in Toronto’s Beaches and fought both the Spit Airport and later plans for a Scarborough Expressway, recalls that there was a feeling of optimism in the air. “It wasn’t a dichotomy between left and right as we have now. It was a battle between the old guard and reformers who were talking about doing things in a new way. It was about a different kind of city, a different kind of community life. The THC was very much the old boys club, the old ways of doing business. They showed a kind of disregard for that new and emerging set of values.” [25]

Many of the older technocrats and planners on the receiving end of these disruptive actions and attitudes were mystified by the cultural changes that made them the targets of the new activists .

Toronto Daily Star writer William Bragg asked pro-Spadina Expressway Metro Commissioner of Roads and Traffic Sam Cass about this cultural change in January 1970. His response was, “The only answer that I can give – and I don’t think it’s a satisfactory answer – is that in very recent years we have seen a tremendous change in the attitude of some people generally which has resulted in protests by primarily youth, but not necessarily, against almost every social and physical institution that has been accepted in the past.”[26]

By 1968 in Toronto, civic group opposition to top-down urban renewal schemes in Trefann Court, Don Vale and the proposed building of the Spadina Expressway through residential areas of downtown Toronto had roiled the political waters. Into this simmering brew the THC introduced the Bold Concept and its plan for a commercial jet airport off the Eastern Beaches. Residents of Toronto’s Ward 9, the Beaches, learned of the scheme via a three-page story in the Port of Toronto News in September 1969.[27] There was an uproar among residents, who feared noisy, smelly jets would be thundering over their quiet streets day and night if the THC plan succeeded.

According to Ken Greenberg, in 1968 the Beaches was also in transition. Until the late 1960s it had been an Anglo-Saxon, working-class neighbourhood, heavily Orange Protestant. “Into the mix came a whole bunch of new people like myself, young professionals and people from all over the world. The opposition [to the Spit Airport] was a really interesting coalition of young renters with new-left sensibilities and old small-c conservative neighbourhood people who owned their houses. It gave the Beaches an almost ornery sensibility about itself.” The newcomers “brought energy and gumption in terms of challenging authority. The old-timers had strong values about protecting neighbourhoods and communities. That combination became the formula for all these movements that formed to defend the city and elect the reform council [in 1972].” [28]

The two opponents–old-style technocrats and politicians with a tradition of top-down planning and the new citizen activists–clashed over the Spit Airport. Controversy started early. On October 21, 1969 Toronto City Clerk Edgar Jones sent a warning letter to THC General Manager E.B. Griffiths telling him that an east-end alderman had said that, “a great deal of concern has been shown by residents in the east end of the city over the effect that this [Spit airport] project will have on their area.” He also complained that “the City of Toronto Planning Board has been unable to obtain precise information as to the exact location of the proposed airport and has not been invited to take part in any of the preliminary discussions.” [29]

Six days later J. Douglas McNish, then THC Board Chairman, sent a defensive letter to the Mayor and the Board of Control complaining, “I resent the implication that the Harbour Commissioners were guilty of withholding information regarding the proposed airport and were dealing with this matter in some hole-in-the-corner manner. The reverse, of course, is true.” He argued that “only a concept has been put forward to date” and that until it is decided “we should not be raising needless doubts and fears in a large segment of the city.” [30]

Richard White evinces some sympathy for the THC’s claims that they did consult and did consider the effect of their projects on the city’s residents. “Postwar modernist urbanism tends to be thought of as a unitary thing, a particular mindset, but top-down Toronto urban renewal projects conceived in 1955 were strikingly different from those conceived in 1965, suggesting a responsiveness to the world around them that urban renewal advocates are not supposed to have had.”[31]Moreover, White argues, not all urban planning technocrats were “of one mind – they clearly disagreed among one another – nor of a fixed mindset – their thinking evolved over time, suggesting that the high modernist technocrat actually may have possessed a little humanity.”[32]

In fact THC archives contain many letters and memos among THC, Metro and city officials discussing engineering and legal considerations of building an airport on the Spit. The THC alerted city officials as early as December 23, 1968 that the “East Headland” that was to become the Leslie Street Spit was under consideration for a major airport.[33] But none were copied to residents or their representatives.

As a result, citizens in the Beaches felt blindsided by the plan revealed to them in the THC newsletter. NDP politician and would-be aldermanic candidate in Ward 9, the Beaches, Reid Scott organized the first protest meeting on November 13, 1969. He drew 500 people. According to newspaper reports, Scott said that the “airport would make the east end one of the more uncomfortable places to live in Metro because of noise and air pollution from jets using the airport.” He called for a “non-partisan” committee of residents and elected officials to “study the plan in detail. To keep the public fully informed and to seek its views to prepare briefs and make representations to different levels of government.”[34]

The initial protests resulted in two things. In November 1969 the city formed a Joint Airport Technical Committee (JATC) to study the matter. The committee comprised officials from the City’s Planning Board, Development Department and Public Works Department, the Metro Toronto Planning Board and the Toronto Harbour Commission. Significantly there was no citizen representation on the JATC. [35] And in February 1970 Beaches citizens formed a new citizen’s action group called ForWard 9 to voice their views [36]

Unrest at the proposed airport continued to build through the spring of 1970. It reached a boiling point in the series of events concentrated in May. “May 1970 was a zenith of sorts for “people power” in the fight against the waterfront airport.” [37]

On May 6, 500 people crowded into St. Lawrence Hall to protest airport plans in a meeting organized by ForWard 9. The crowd grilled representatives of the City Planning Board about the need for a waterfront airport. Planners acknowledged the plan needed more study. “This public confrontation…ended without resolution of the issue but it marked a victory for ForWard 9 in elevating the waterfront airport issue to general public scrutiny from just being an ‘east-end issue.’” [38]

The THC did not react well to the rising anti-Leslie-Street-airport clamour. J.D. McNish, THC Chairman, complained to the meeting, “I resent the implication that the Commission is withholding information. We’re on trial here and we haven’t committed an offence.” [39]

The THC provided an inviting target for the young activists. According to Phil Carter a Toronto architect and former Chairman of ForWard 9, “They just operated their little fiefdom down there at the Toronto Harbour Commission. They had no accountability to anyone. …The Harbour Commissioner had his own yacht. He would take people out in his fancy boat. It’s like they had their own kingdom down there.” [40]

The newspapers began to weigh in. On May 8 the Toronto Star editorialized: “Building an airport out in the lake doesn’t show much imagination. The trick is to find a site that wouldn’t spoil the lifestyle of a pleasant part of the city.” [41]

A week later ForWard 9’s Airport Task Force called another meeting at a local church. 500 attended. They chose Dr. Gerald Hodge, Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Toronto, as their prospective representative to the city committee on airports.[42] City Council took notice. On May 15, 1970 Council, after much debate and opposition from conservative aldermen, voted to appoint Hodge to the JATC committee. It was an historic move in Toronto’s citizen protest movement. [43]

Reporting on Hodge’s appointment, the Toronto Star’s William Cameron noted that Hodge would be the first private citizen in Canada appointed to such a committee.”That doesn’t sound very revolutionary. It is, in fact, a radical change in the way municipal politicians and planners deal with citizen’s groups. For the first time, a group representative is going to be allowed to participate in the planning sessions of a crucial public facility.” Cameron quotes new Ward 9 alderman Reid Scott, who moved that Toronto City Council approve Hodge and was elated after his motion passed with the surprise backing of old-guard Mayor William Dennison. “I don’t know if they realize what it is that they’ve just done. This sets a precedent certainly. It gives citizen’s groups the right to be consulted in the planning, pre-political stages of a project that concerns them…If they’d had this kind of thing on the Spadina Expressway, that whole tragedy would never have arisen…This could be the answer.” [44]

The federal government quickly threw in the towel. Shortly after the May 14 church rally, federal Transportation Minister Don Jamieson wrote to ForWard 9 organizers saying the federal government had no intention of constructing an airport for jet aircraft on the Toronto waterfront, but he did not rule out an airport that accommodated Short Take-off and Landing (STOL) propeller-driven planes. [45] As Hodge noted, “Jamieson was throwing the ball back to the local technocrats.” [46]

Through the fall and winter of 1970, ForWard 9 struggled to prepare a technical brief to JATC that would argue against the need for an airport. But “when they requested information from government sources, they were told everything was confidential…One important study was finally obtained through the fortuitous seating arrangement of a ForWard 9 member on an Ottawa plane next to the technocrat who had written the study.” [47]

ForWard 9 kept up the pressure. Writing in the Toronto Star, Dorothy Thomas, a ForWard 9 member who was two years later to become a Ward 9 Alderman, warned that although many in the Beaches had breathed a sigh of relief when Jamieson announced there would be no jet aircraft on the waterfront, there was much ambiguity in the statement and that even a STOL airport at the foot of Leslie would amount to “a scheme to rape yet another of Toronto’s few remaining natural resources for the convenience of some mythical ‘busy executives’…according to [Toronto] mayor William Dennison. “ [48]

Meanwhile, Jack Jones THC Chief Engineer, author of the Bold Concept and old- school planning technocrat, had lost all patience with this new process of consultation, complaining to General Manager E.B. Griffiths in a confidential memo that the JATC “includes people definitely opposed to a waterfront airport” and that the committee is just “a means by which those opposed to a new waterfront airport could block the resolution of the airport issue.” He notes that a final report from the JATC is still two or three years away and recommends that the THC, as true stewards of the waterfront, should go over the heads of the Committee. “The THC [is] in effect the waterfront aviation authority and in my opinion should report directly to their principals on the City of Toronto Executive Committee.” [49] In the event, Griffiths did not follow Jones’s advice and the work of the JATC ground on.

In the interim the THC was being bled dry by mounting deficits from the Toronto Island airport, which General Manager Griffiths totalled at $1,926,000 from 1962 to 1972. [50] Meanwhile Jack Jones continued to stir the pot, telling the Royal Canadian Institute in February 1972 that the THC still believed the Spit was the best place for a new airport, generating a thunderous letter from ForWard 9 spokesman and York University professor Roy Merrens to the THC’s new Chair J.H. Addison demanding a clarification. [51]

But Jones was too late. A month later, on March 14, 1972, the federal government dropped a bombshell on the JATC. G.E. McDowell, Toronto Area Airport Projects, Department of Transport rose to address the committee. He reminded them that two weeks earlier, on March 2, 1972 the federal government announced its intention to build a second Toronto international airport north of Pickering. He went on to tell the committee that the provincial government had indicated that all plans for Harbour City were terminated and that any studies on the suitability of a STOL airport for Toronto would now be confined to the existing (Island) airport only. And that their duties would be wound down.[52]

The Spit Airport saga was effectively over. ForWard 9 had won.

Over time, the loss of the THC’s Bold Concept bet led to deep changes in the agency. By January 1974 Roy Merrens had been named a Harbour Commissioner. By 1976 the THC had a Director of Public Information and Community Relations, and by 1994, reflecting recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Future of the Toronto Waterfront, THC’s role was restricted to management of port facilities and the Island Airport. The development of surplus port lands, once the purview of the THC, passed to the city.[53] In 1999 the name of the diminished agency was changed to the Toronto Port Authority.

For its part, ForWard 9, which was spawned in opposition to the Spit Airport, “moved fairly quickly from defensive issues [such as opposing the proposed Scarborough Expressway] to going on the offensive.” [54] The group used Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation funding to found a housing coop, Forward 9 Homes, which bought and renovated homes in the ward and offered them as co op housing units, of which 70 continue to operate. [55] In 1972 ForWard 9 member Dorothy Thomas was elected to Toronto City Council, joining other civic activists in a cohort often called the Reform Council, led by mayor David Crombie.

Prior to the placement of ForWard 9 member Gerald Hodge on the JATC, technocrats talking only to one another was the accepted way project planning was conducted in Toronto. After Hodge’s appointment citizen inclusion in planning became the norm. Citizens in east-end Toronto were emboldened. “ForWard 9 members felt like we had made a difference,” recalled Ken Greenberg, “We felt like we now had capacity.” [56]

Greenberg draws a direct line from the legacy of ForWard 9 to a recent set of citizen groups that have successfully defended the Toronto waterfront against what they saw as exploitive development, citing Code Blue which rallied citizens from across Toronto to derail plans for a ferris wheel and casino development in Toronto’s Port Lands, No Casinos Toronto which fought to keep a planned casino out of Ontario Place and No Jets which continues to lobby to prevent jet aircraft from gaining landing rights to Toronto Island Airport.[57]

The battle over the Leslie Street Spit Airport had a clear winner and a clear loser. The Toronto Harbour Commission (renamed Ports Toronto in 2015) was ultimately unable to overcome its twin historical burdens of a precarious self-financing fiscal model and its structural lack of accountability, which led to a certain tone-deafness to the cultural and political changes occurring in Toronto in the late 1960s. Both deficits led to the defeat of the Bold Concept and the agency’s steady decline in influence over larger issues of Toronto waterfront development after the 1970s.

For its part, ForWard 9 capitalized on Toronto’s civic reformist wave of the late 1960s and the earlier organizational example of citizen protests in Trefann Court, Don Vale and especially the Stop Spadina movement. It’s lasting contribution to the growth of neighbourhood agency in Toronto, however, was to place a citizen on a major planning body for the first time. This became a model and allowed citizens direct influence on policy creation and the ability to “outlast” bureaucratic inertia and achieve their desired community outcome. It was to be an enduring legacy.

[11] A Bold Concept: A Conceptual Plan for the development of the city of Toronto Waterfront, Toronto Harbour Commission, January 1968, Archives of Toronto (AOT), Fond 265, Series 1270, Subseries 2, File 7.

The population of the town of Markham has drastically increased over the years and plans for a new hospital were underway as early as the 1950s. During that time, residents predicated that the population was going to increase in the upcoming decades. At the beginning of the 1960s, a campaign for the Markham Stouffville Hospital was launched.[1] The following essay if going to argue the Markham Stouffville Hospital board of directors faced several challenges in dealing with the community and the provincial government of Ontario during the development process. One of the most important aspects about the hospital is that community involvement, donations and fundraising helped the board of directors make the hospital project a success. One of the first challenges that the board of directors faced was gaining approval from the provincial government.

The Markham Stouffville Hospital board of directors was founded in 1968.[2] It was not until 1982, when the name of the hospital was changed from Markham York Hospital to Markham Stouffville Hospital. Mayor of Whitchurch-Stouffville, Eldred King believed that the new name was more representative of the area, that the future hospital would be servicing. After careful consideration, the hospital board decided to change the name.[3] During the late 1960s the province of Ontario created the “Toronto-Centered Region” plan and transit-oriented development. Compact urban form was developed as a way to practice sustainability.[4] This kind of practice helped towns, like Markham, become more accessible to facilities and the plans for a new hospital was a project that was a popular topic of conversation among Markham residents, the Ontario provincial government and the municipal politicians of Markham. There were debates going on between city council members about the land uses in York Region County as early as the 1960s, but competitive city planning in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) started in the 1950s.

Competitive city planning is a result of postwar metropolitan planning. During the 1950s, Toronto was shaped by mass production, automobile based suburbanization, downtown urban renewal, modernist planning, federal-provincial housing, mortgage finance, immigration, and transportation policies.[5] When Metro Toronto was founded in 1953, there were six local governments, which consisted of Toronto, Scarborough, North York, Etobicoke, East York, and York. These areas represented contradictory territorial compromise between inner city and the postwar suburban municipalities.[6] Political Activist, John Sewell, refers to York Region County as the “southern six”. This region consists of the townships of Vaughan and Markham, the towns of Richmond Hill and Markham, and the Villages of Woodbridge and Stouffville.[7] Around 1966, these areas were predicted to have high pressure development and the York Region Council tried to convince the Ontario Water Resources Commission (OWRC) to investigate joint water and sewage possibilities. In 1967, the Smith Committee Report was released and it mentioned a proposal to transform the York Region County and areas west into the Metro Highlands regional government.[8] In February 1968, the York Region County Council formed a committee of senior staff, which reviewed Smith’s recommendations.[9] Sewell’s information proves that Markham was growing at a fast pace, even in the 1960s. After reviewing Smith’s report, the committee said that it was important to not disrupt the rapid growth and economic development.[10] The committee concluded that the present technological standards, of that time, showed the York Region County as a suitable place for farming, estates, recreation, and small towns and villages. Sewell states that this kind of area is best suited for low density uses of land and that it is important to protect the conservation of resources and to minimize pollution.[11] In a strange way, Sewell’s idea about this kind of contradicts that idea about a hospital being put into place, because a facility like that requires potential farmland being taken away, as well as vast uses of valuable and vital resources. A hospital is an excellent facility to have in a town like Markham, because it benefits the residents. It can, however, be a disadvantage to the natural environment because it can potentially cause pollution. The Minister of Treasury, Economics, and Intergovernmental Affairs, Darcy McKeough met with the Richmond Hill City Council in April 1969. During this meeting, McKeough presented ideas for a regional government. The York Region City Council created a report, which stated, “The County unit can provide an efficient and practical means of achieving local needs as opposed to the disadvantages associated with central control be senior governments far removed from the local scene”[12] This report argues that the local needs of Markham were important to the city council and one of those needs was a local hospital that was deemed acceptable by the council because of expanding urbanization. This report can also argue that gaining access and approval for facilities, such as a hospital is a challenging process.

In October 1969, the Executive of Markham commissioned a study of the use of property. This study helped define the future role in the delivery of healthcare in the Markham area. This study also created a relationship between Markham Stouffville Hospital, the York Central Association for the Mentally Challenged, and the Cerebral Palsy Parent Council of Toronto.[13] By 1970, the hospital board received 50 acres of land which was a donation from Philanthropist, Arthur Latcham, however, they ran into difficulties in obtaining Charter approval. When the Ministry of Health approved of the board and the land, they told the hospital board that they were not allowed to ask for funds for the future hospital, until the town of Markham reached the population guidelines.[14] The first meeting that the hospital committee had was at 8:00pm on April 24 1979 on Main Street in Markham.[15] During this meeting, the board members discussed that back in March 1976, Chairman of the Markham Stouffville Hospital Committee, Donald Deacon said that the Ministry of Health was responsible for making the final decision as to where the hospital site was going to be. Deacon also stated that the board had to approach the subject cautiously because the government was not going to offset an operating deficit.[16] The provincial Government of Ontario is responsible for preparing regional demographic projections and issues dealing with general planning policy statements.[17] Deciding where the future hospital should be was difficult for the board of directors.

There were several debates going on about whether or not the hospital should located on Highway 48 between Major Mackenzie Dr. and 16th Avenue. The hospital board did approve of that idea because they believed that it would benefit the residents.[18] The other desired location for the potential hospital was in southeastern York Region located on 9th Line, just north of Highway 7.[19] This piece of property was already home to Participation House and Pine Point Lodge, which were both gifts to the community from Latcham.[20] In order to establish a suitable hospital, the population in Stouffville, Markham, and Unionville, from Don Mills on the west to Brougham on the east, would have to be around 35,000. This population would meet the appropriate guidelines, which were four and a half treatment beds per 1,000 people.[21] The hospital board members faced a busy time during the 1970s and 1980s because of the expansion of suburbs, within the town.

The majority of the planning for the Markham Stouffville Hospital occurred during the 1970s and 1980s. Markham was in the second wave of development during that time and it extended up until the early 1990s, when the hospital project finally came to an end. The second wave is also known as the inner suburbs. Conventional suburban development was taking place during the 1970s and 1980s and is known to be some of North America’s largest concentration of plans prepared with traditional neighborhood design principals.[22] The development policies that took place during these two decades expanded a commercial tax base, which demanded a single-family detached homes and new roads.[23] These policies proved that the population of Markham was in fact growing. Markham Councillors wanted to continuously expand the urbanized area in more compact forms, but they also wanted to use the New Urbanist design principals. This would help achieve the objectives that were emerged as a reaction to the conventional suburbs.[24] The hospital board continued to gain approval from the Health Ministry regarding the hospital site.

In March 1977, Deacon told the Assistant Deputy Minister that he wanted a promised decision regarding the hospital site by the end of the year. The Deputy Minister stated that the hospital site chosen had a great deal of merit and that he had studied the plans closely after looking at the population map that was prepared by the Markham Planning Committee.[25] After some consideration, the hospital board settled on the land located at the 9th Line and Highway 7 location, to be the site the future hospital.[26] The support for the hospital project was continuing to grow. Upon a hospital board presentation that was held in September 1979, it was revealed that the York Central Hospital and the Region of York supported the hospital project. Chairman of the Richmond Hill Hospital Board, Bill Lazenby said that he hoped that the former village of Markham will get it’s hospital.[27] The Markham Good Neighbors Club told the Markham Council that their members were in full supporting mode for the hospital to be built on the property that was donated for the purpose.[28] On December 4 1979, Health Minister, Dennis Timbrell mailed a letter to Chairman, Rogers Gardham regarding the Ministry’s new hospital building program in Scarborough. Timbrell advised Gardham that the Scarborough Committee made recommendations for a site for the Salvation Army Scarborough Grace Hospital in south Markham and north Scarborough.[29] He advised Gardham that the site that the Salvation Army owned on Birchmount Avenue in Scarborough was selected for a community general hospital with a capacity of 300 beds and 200 of those were later opened up in 1985.[30] Timbrell said in the letter that the Ministry would be specifically looking at the town of Markham for a new hospital building program and future hospital requirements. Timbrell stated that he was planning to meet with the representatives of the York County Hospital, Newmarket, York Central Hospital, Richmond Hill, The York-Markham Provincial Board, and the York Region government sometime in early 1980.[31] The hospital board finally got their wishes of hospital approval granted in 1981.

An article from the Markham Economist and Sun newspaper, dated on August 20 1981 indicated that the province of Ontario agreed on the idea that Markham needed a new hospital and that the next hospital that was to be built in the GTA would be built in this town.[32] During a committee meeting Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Lachlan Cattanach stated, “now it is just a question of time and the allotment of capital financing”.[33] Cattanach also stated that Timbrell not only supported the concept of a hospital being built in Markham, but he would also include the hospital project into the capital expenditure list that his ministry would be presenting to the cabinet. Timbrell requested the Markham group to arrange meetings with the ministry to discuss the long-term financing and planning of the hospital.[34] Member of Provincial Parliament, Don Cousens, who represented the York group during the meeting, stated that some of the major challenges to the hospital have been overcome. Cousens said that the big problem that they had at that point in time was the availability of financing. The opportunity to receive money for the hospital, as well as other projects was tough because of the economic circumstances.[35] The provincial government agreed to pay for two-thirds of the building cost and the other remaining one-third would come from the Region of York and local fund-raising projects.[36] This would become one of the most important aspects of the development of the Markham Stouffville Hospital.

The estimated cost for building the hospital was $50 million and the communities portion was $5 million.[37] Chief Operating Officer of American Express Canada and General Chairman for the Hospital Building Fund Campaign, Edwin Cooperman kicked off a fundraising campaign that with a generous donation of $25,000 from American Express.[38] Cooperman was in good spirits and said that he was confident that the community would be able to raise $5 million in a reasonable amount of time. “This is a large project which will test the strength of many of us… and we are going to meet goals” he said enthusiastically.[39] The Markham Stouffville Hospital Fund officially started on April 24 1983 during the Gala “kick off” dinner dance held at the Markville Mall Shopping Centre, which provided entertainment by Rob McConnell and his 16-piece orchestra band. The hospital fund had exceeded their goals and raised more than $30,000 that night.[40] President of Emerson Electric, Markham, Hugh Allan pledged $125,000 over a five-year period. Lions Club President, Don Way and incoming president, Jim Wicks donated a cheque of $50,000.[41] JDS Developments who were the owners of Markville Mall at this time, were absolutely thrilled about the event being hosted at the shopping centre.[42] There were many representatives of corporations that helped out with fundraising for the hospital project. A.C. Neilsons was a company that helped fuel the fundraising drive. A retired employee of the company, named Lyal Moody said that he would be concentrating his efforts on enlisting corporate support.[43] During the gala dinner, McDonalds Franchise Owner, Dick Cohen announced the “Be a Builder” campaign for the hospital project. Cohen said that McDonalds was going to contribute to the fund through a sale of “I am a Builder” slogan buttons for $1 and bricks for $25. The campaign started at the gala and ended on May 29 1983, which is when a closing ceremony for the ending of the campaign took place, to which Ronald McDonald made an appearance at. Cohen said that he hoped to make thousands of dollars during the campaign and that he had several other unique ideas in order to capture the customers interest.[44] The hospital fund even received contributions from small business’ within the Markham area. An example of one of these business’ was Sebastian Rizza’s Hairstyling, who donated all of their profits to the fund after a one-day thrust.[45] The hospital board achieved a great deal of success in the year 1984.

Chairman of Planning for the hospital, Mac Cosburn said that he hoped that the construction of the hospital would begin in the summer of 1984.[46] In 1984, the Markham Stouffville Hospital Fund received a generous donation of $551,785 from a Farmer named Harvey Bunker.[47] Bunker was 91-years-old when he passed away on February 29 1984 and it was written in his will that he wanted the money from the sale of his family farm, which was located on the 9th Line, to go to the hospital fund, in memory of himself, as well as his sister Florence and brother, Thomas.[48] Prior to his passing, Bunker lived in Green Gables Manor, in Stouffville. While living in this area, Bunker had a keen interest in the Markham Stouffville Hospital project and he wanted make a contribution to the fund.[49] The Markham Stouffville Hospital Board of Trustees adopted the official logo in 1984.[50] It was designed for use of all signage, stationary, and forms, which were used when the hospital first opened. Cattanach stated that the hospital board members unamiously approved of the logo. Cattanach said that the logo would communicate with the community and let them know that the hospital was going to be a place in which professionals of the highest standards will be working there and they will be as compassionate as possible to their patients. The logo is two-toned blue and was usued for several of the fundraising activities, prior to the opening of the hospital.[51] The residents living in Markham during the mid 1980s witnessed the hospital in it’s fullest stage of development.

The architects, Mathers & Haldenby were chosen to design the Markham Stouffville Hospital in 1983. Mathers & Haldenby helped design Roy Thompson Hall, Toronto General Hospital, and St. Michael’s Hospital, which are all located in the GTA[52] Over 20 different firms were considered for the project, but the hospital board had the most amount of faith in Mathers & Haldenby because they were well qualified due to their extensive experience in hospital and community facility design work.[53] In 1982, the firm received the Design Award from the Ontario Mason’s Relations Council, because of their outstanding work on the John David Eaton Wing in Toronto General Hospital.[54] Andrew Mathers was a senior partner that was in charge of the hospital project and he commented on how the Toronto General Hospital project was a “handsome addition to the urban frame of downtown Toronto”.[55] Architect, Henry Lowry said that it is important for architects to keep flexibility in mind when building a facility, such as a hospital. Lowry was confident that Markham Stouffville Hospital was going to be as flexible as possible for the future patients.[56] In 1983, the Ontario Ministry of Health predicted that the hospital was going to respond to over 30,000 emergency visits per year and provide 65,000 patient days for medical and surgical care.[57] With these statistics in mind, it was obviously crucial to have a hospital that was going to meet the needs of the residents. The design for the hospital was finalized in 1986.[58] In 1984, the hospital board faced one of their largest challenges because the issue of abortions came into existence.

Pro-life groups were trying to gain control of the Markham Stouffville Hospital Board of Trustees and it caused tension within the community. The future Markham Stouffville Hospital was a battleground for pro-life and pro-choice groups.[59] “I’m extremely irate that a pro-life group which represents a minority opinion in our country has taken control over a situation as if they were a majority” said Leda Waite.[60] The angry resident of Markham donated $1,000 to the fund and was ready to demand it back because of the pro-life groups. “I have better places to give it to…” Waite said bitterly.[61] She was unimpressed with the small town mentality that the town of Markham adopted and exclaimed that any woman would be able to obtain the right to an abortion in the city of Toronto. There were nearly 2,000 pro-life residents living in Markham during this time and these residents were a part of a group called “Right to Life”. President of York South Right to Life, Margaret Goodier said that she was surprised by the media attention that was gained because of the issue. Treasurer of the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League (CARAL), Lee Tyler-Milne stated in a letter that was sent to the Ministry of Health, that a special interest group should not be allowed to move like that and affect the hospital board. CARAL had members living in Markham, Unionville, and Stouffville.[62] Goodier told the board of trustees that they hope they will not have to have another meeting about the issue. The Markham Economist and Sun article, “abortion fight likely at hospital meeting”, ended with Goodier quoting, “Our concern is the right to life of the unborn child”.[63] Many of the residents living in Markham and Stouffville were anxious about the start of Markham Stouffville Hospital project, more so than the abortion issue.

A fantastic ceremony took place at the future hospital site, located at the corner of 9th Line and Highway 7 on the morning of November 23 1985.[64] Some of the hospital delegates spoke briefly, but the highlight of the ceremony were the two parachutes that were dropped from an above aircraft, which acted as a pinpoint as to where the future hospital was going to be built. More than 100 helium balloons were released, with tags indicating that the balloons came from the ceremony.[65] The Markham Economist and Sun learnt that one of the balloons traveled as far as the state of Vermont, when a farmer named Gordon Eurich Sr. found one while hunting in the woods on the morning after the ceremony. There were other balloons found in the states of New Jersey and Maine.[66] The atmosphere at the future hospital grounds was exciting. Even though it was a cold and wet morning, thousands of people showed up for the ceremony, with their shovels, and participated in the sod turning ceremony.[67] During this time the hospital had 206 beds and it was predicated that the construction was going to be completed by the Summer of 1988. The abortion issue continued to haunt the hospital board elections that took place on June 5 1986.[68]

More than 2,000 hospital corporation members were predicted to show up to the meeting, as pro-life and pro-choice forces battle over for control of the hospital board.[69] The candidates for the hospital board tried to downplay the abortion issue, by saying that the most important concern was the construction of the hospital. Bart Cull, who was a Unionville agency member stated that, “abortion is not the important issue, the important issue is to build the hospital”.[70] The York South Right to Life group endorsed a list of candidates, who were in favor of the pro-life stance against abortion. There were 11 candidates that were recommended by the hospital board, because they did not represent a special interest group.[71] There was no record obtained as to who those candidates were, nor a record of how the meeting in June went. The abortion issue did however, stretch into the year 1988. At this point in time, the hospital board was still undecided as to whether or not abortions were going to be allowed to take place at the future hospital. The Supreme Court of Canada struck down the abortion law in 1988 by stating that it was unconstitutional. That court decision affected the area hospitals, including Markham Stouffville. Hospital Board Chairman, Joan Wood said that the board was going to monitor political and legal developments regarding the issue. Wood insisted that the matter would be fully dealt with by the time the hospital opens.[72] Markham Stouffville Hospital did open their doors only a short while later.

After years of hard work from both the hospital delegates and the community, the Markham Stouffville Hospital project finally came to an end. Markham Stouffville Hospital opened their doors to the public on March 5 1990.[73] It took several years for the hospital board to gain government approval, but they accomplished it. It took several years to raise the money for the hospital to be built, and that goal was also accomplished. Lastly, it took several years for the construction to completed, but it was achieved. By 1991, the population of Markham was nearly 155,000.[74] The current address for Markham Stouffville Hospital is located at 381 Church St. in Markham, Ontario.[75] In January 2004, the Markham Stouffville Hospital Corporation partnered up with Uxbridge Cottage Hospital. This was done as a way to help out the growing community of Uxbridge and to practice the developing changes in the provision of community care.[76] The current address for the Uxbridge location is 4 Campbell Dr. in Uxbridge, Ontario.[77] If it was not for the overwhelming generosity of the community, this facility would not have been around to service the well populated community. It was the beginning of a new and wonderful era in Markham and the Markham Stouffville Hospital was a successful project.

City planning began in Markham during the 1950s because the population was expected to increase in the upcoming decades. During the 1960s, a full fledged campaign started for a new hospital to be built in Markham, Ontario. The province of Ontario agreed to pay for two-thirds of the hospital and it was up to the community to help pay for the remaining one-third. Fundraising and donations helped make the hospital project a success. The hospital board dealt with several issues regarding government approval, finding a potential site for the future hospital, and of course the battle between pro-life and pro-choice groups. The hospital board overcame these challenges and the Markham Stouffville Hospital became a successful project.

When discussing J.B. Salsberg, there are two main associations that instantly surface: Jew and Communist. Salsberg was a dominant figure both politically and socially for the twentieth-century Toronto Jewish labour movement. But these words hardly do justice to the depth of this man. It is true that for many decades Salsberg was a loyal member of the Communist Party of Canada, aspired to socialist ideals, and even encouraged militant activism on behalf of working-class people. However, by no means were his intentions subversive or harmful. He was simply a champion of ordinary people who, as the title of Gerald Tulchinsky’s insightful biography of Salsberg suggests, committed his life to fighting for their rights. The purpose of this essay is to forward that Salsberg’s thirty-year tenure in the Communist Party was not driven by a desire to achieve a socialist society as an end. Rather, in socialism, Salsberg saw a means to achieving the eradication of anti-Semitism and ameliorating the dire working conditions of the working-class. As this paper will later clarify, these two goals were inextricably linked through what was historically (and arguably continues to be) known as the “Jewish Problem.” In the ensuing discussion, this paper will track the following: Salsberg’s humble origins and how his religious family atmosphere fostered a commitment to social justice; his exposure in the labour force that pushed him away from traditional religion to secular Judaism and the labour movement; domestic and international events that led to his “radicalization” in joining the Communist Party; his turbulent political career as both a public servant and labour organizer; and finally his decision to drop the Party based on his experience that led to his ideological reform, or as I would call it, catharsis.

Born on November 5, 1902, to Sarah-Gitel and Abraham, Joseph Baruch Salsberg spent the first decade of his childhood in his hometown of Lagow. [1] Lagow was territorially part of the Pale of Settlement, a demarcated area where Jews were forced to live throughout lands under the jurisdiction of Imperial Russia. [2] Salsberg’s father was a devout Jew, both in belief and practice. Educated in a heder or Jewish boys seminary, Abraham was influenced by an orthodox movement known as Hasidism. [3] This philosophy preached the strict religious observance of Judaism, which in turn would bring about the Messiah and end the Jewish exile that began nearly two thousand years ago when the Romans sacked Jerusalem and initiated the global Jewish diaspora. [4] Abraham was also a working man who came from a long line of bakers, but living through a time when industrialization was ubiquitous, he thought to modernize. [5] With the dowry money he received through marriage, he attempted to establish a grain business. [6] The failed venture acted as a decisive factor in his immigration to Canada in 1911. Two years later, in 1913 he was joined by his wife and children because he believed that “Poland held no future for a Jew,” given the rise in anti-Semitism spurred by the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. [7] Salsberg’s mother was a traditional housewife who managed their Cecil St. home while Salsberg’s father became a junk peddler. [8] Abraham often brought out young Joseph on the job and passed on his teachings of canonical Jewish writings. [9] Salsberg stated that moving close to the Spadina Garment District was a “natural choice” because it was the “heartland of a small Jewish community.“ [10] Ruth Frager expands on this idea by stating that many immigrant Jews “tended to congregate” around this area because of the cheap pricing and availability of work in the needle trades that dominated Spadina Avenue. [11] Salsberg grew up in the “traditional religious atmosphere” that was present both at home and his surroundings. [12] He reminisced, “my parents got along beautifully, the only time they would quarrel was when my father wasn’t sure that my mother would not be able to strictly follow the religious observance, such as turning off the stove before the beginning of Sabbath at sundown” [13]. Such was the piety of his family, that so profoundly shaped young Joseph’s attitudes. His mother participated in a charity called “malbish arumim” (literally, clothing the naked) that entailed making clothes for infants of poor parents. [14] Young Joseph was also encouraged to practice benevolence towards his fellow Jews, when he would go around collecting charity to buy Sabbath meals for the needy. [15]

In 1913, Salsberg also began his secular education at Landsdowne, only to drop out three years later in 1916. [16] At the age of 14, Salsberg went out into the work force to supplement the “modest income” of his father in order to help support the family of nine. [17] The following years that he spent in the labour force were perhaps the most impressionable on Salsberg and prepared him for his “radicalization.” The Toronto Jewish labour movement was unique because the experience of the Jewish immigrants differed markedly from that of other ethnic groups. [18] Unlike Jews who lived on foreign lands for millennia, other ethnic groups usually emigrated from their home countries. In some instances those groups were not previously oppressed. Many of them moved simply to seek economic opportunity. However, anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe was not limited to pogroms and violence, but also existed in more subtle forms. Aside from restrictions on owning land, which already precluded them from being farmers, there were limitations on higher education and occupations. [19] To this end, Jews adopted skilled trades as a means of supporting themselves, but saw these anti-Semitic restrictions as the reason they were subjected to such impoverished conditions. [20] Socialism was also gaining momentum in Eastern Europe around the turn of the century and many Jewish immigrants were exposed to it before arriving in Toronto. [21] In Toronto, this knowledge translated into a strong working-class culture, which reared itself in the predominantly Jewish-led unions that were significantly more militant than that of non-Jewish labour groups. [22] In fact, many employers even preferred non-Jewish workers because they were more likely to be less resistant to the working conditions. [23] Salsberg exhibited this militancy from a young age when at the age of 12 he led his Jewish classmates in a “strike” against the compulsory singing of Christmas carols in public schools. [24]

Salsberg worked his way through several factories until he earned a position as a skilled position as a cutter for Cooper Cap Company on Spadina. [25] Despite the fact that he was earning more than he should have been, it did not take long for him to join the United Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers’ International Union. [26] He joined as a response to the realities of the harsh working conditions of the factories, but also for a higher purpose, which is captured by the Union’s constitution: “not only to improve working conditions but also to take a very active part in all important socialist campaigns.” [27] In 1918, his decision to get involved and take a stance against the economic exploitation of workers was solidified and he announced to his parents that he was turning away from their orthodox path in favour of pursuing one rooted in social justice. [28] “I wanted to be guided by reason, not faith. I wanted to know… to understand.” [29] As one could imagine, his father was not very excited about his son deviating from the path he had set out for him, which was to become a rabbi. He claimed, that his mother was more open-minded, and although his father held his peace, he asked that he did not drag along his younger siblings. [30]

Once Salsberg was derailed from his religious roots, he found his first set of answers in Labour Zionism. [31] As Salsberg later said: “I stopped relying on supernatural forces to bring about an ideal society and found the answer in Poale Zion.” [32] Salsberg joined Poale Zion (literally, workers of Zion), a youth movement, in which he saw, at the time, the solution to the Jewish Problem. Instead of “believing the Messiah would come and solve all problems of Jews and Gentiles alike” Salsberg was captivated by the idea of the “self-liberating process, through human effort, of the establishment of the Jewish homeland in Palestine based and governed by Socialist principles.” [33] Like many Jews at the time, Salsberg responded to the “egalitarian promise of Socialism.” [34] He continued to be involved in the Union, eventually climbing the administrative ranks to strike organizer, and in 1921 Salsberg earned himself a post in the Poale Zion movement as National Secretary. [35] Shortly thereafter, there was a dramatic break from the movement in 1923, the urgency of which can be observed in the telegram sent to Salsberg on June 2, 1923: “Your failure to return created a very dangerous situation in our movement… You must return immediately to settle junior affairs.” [36] It was at this time that the “Russian experience began to take effect.” [37] Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, it took several years to re-establish the new Bolshevik government. News reached Toronto around 1920-22, which caused a fissure in the Jewish left, making room for a further Jewish left, the communist supporters. [38] The news of the living conditions of Soviet Jewry spurred debate about what it meant for the future of international Jewry and what model to follow. The “moderate” left (for a lack of a better word) did not appreciate the implications of the Russian revolution, while the new far left, praised and aspired to it. Salsberg was of the latter. He explained that the first of these developments was Lenin’s outlawing of anti-Semitism, making it punishable by death. [39] Subsequently, minority rights were granted, including official state recognition of the Yiddish language in schools and courts, among other institutions. [40] Universities started to have Yiddish departments and the barriers on education and occupations were lifted. [41] There was an influx of Jewish intellectuals and writers who were sponsored by state publishing houses that distributed their Yiddish literature [42]. Salsberg described it as a time of “Jewish cultural flowering.” [43] It was truly remarkable. This was Salsberg’s “radicalization” that he saw, in communism, which was simply the Soviet model of a socialist society, the solution to the Jewish Problem, such that it eradicated anti-Semitism and made way for a just and equitable society.

By 1925, Salsberg was deeply involved with his union, organizing strikes through a Toronto office and he eventually became a national organizer after joining the Communist Party of Canada in 1926. [44] As a party man, he had to adjust to (or at least not “publicly oppose”) party ideology, much of which came from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union via Moscow. [45] One departure from his prior reasoning was that the CPSU, and thus the CPC, did not support Zionism. The Soviet Union even set aside a plot of land for a Jewish settlement known as Birobidjan [46]. This settlement was planned to be semi-autonomous with aspirations of eventually forming a Jewish Republic [47]. Communism dictated that it alone could achieve the egalitarian conditions that many minority groups, including the Jews, desired; there was no need for a separate Jewish state in Palestine. Additionally, the CPSU viewed the Balfour Declaration as an “Imperialist Enterprise” that was driven by self-interest of the British Empire and therefore in opposition to the communist movement [48]. In hindsight, Salsberg claimed that he never opposed Zionism, but did see eye-to-eye with the Party on the fact that there were still resistant Arab nations and that even if established the new state would do nothing to solve the problem of Jews who would continue to live abroad [49]. Thus for Party politics, he slightly adjusted his position to a Jewish cultural nationalist and never publicly opposed them on the question of Zionism.

Salsberg did, however, oppose the party on other questions, which led to his first expulsion (in hindsight, suspension) from the CPC in 1929, [50] To avoid having to delve into the intricacies of union politics, simply consider that Salsberg’s efforts to strengthen the unions were constantly hindered by the Party’s attempt to centralize and Bolshevize. As a result, he resigned his post and after a squabble with leader Tim Buck, he was expelled. This is evident by the statement issued by the political committee of the CPC on November 1929: “[Salsberg] repudiated party leadership as being incapable of carrying out the policy it had advocated and was not able to reconcile on theoretical differences.” [51] Salsberg replied on May 10, 1930 with the following: “a leadership which tried to Bolshevize our party… are harbouring dangerous illusion.” [52] He did, however, attempt to appeal his case for reinstatement, which only occurred several years later. Clearly then, Salsberg was not fond of the idea of a Bolshvized (centralized) party subservient to Moscow. Ian McKay explored this question further. The ‘Moscow Rules’ hypothesis stipulates that the CPC was fully subservient to the CPSU and that there was no room for interpretation for the rules that they received from Moscow. [53] Salsberg was opposed to this, further supporting that he was not wholeheartedly committed to the logistics of Communism. Rather, as McKay proposed, Salsberg showed signs favouring, what is known as “depression era democracy” [54]. The left gravitated toward this idea and differed from the Soviet-type of communism. [55] For Salsberg, in particular, communism was about “central ideology and rhetoric, or the politics or economics… it was about the peoples’ involvement to champion their rights. [56]

In 1932, Salsberg returned to the party and continued his work as a national labour organizer under the popular slogan, “organizing the unorganized.” [57] He applied his beliefs in local democracies through his organizing tactics. According to Gerald Tulchinsky, “He operated as a good trade unionist rather than a Bolshevist, modifying and adapting to every locality.” [58] His impressive career as an organizer throughout the 1930s led to some monumental feats, such as the 1937 autoworkers’ strike. [59] Although his Jewish identity was paramount, he always empathized with other minority groups and those struggling to achieve working-class rights. In the late 1930s, Salsberg decided to enter electoral politics. It is not exactly clear why, but perhaps by witnessing the plight of the working-class for so many years he realized the problem was systemic, and thus believed he could be more effective in the legislature. Salsberg went up for election on all levels. He lost municipally in Toronto for Ward 4 in 1934, 1935, and 1936; he lost provincially for St. Andrew in 1937. [60] His platform was based on accommodations for working-class people such as unemployment assistance, better housing, and cheaper prices for necessities such as coal, which was consistent with his socialist ideals. [61] However, the constituency he ran for, spanning the predominantly Jewish, working-class area of Spadina and Kensington Market made his loss questionable. One proposed explanation is that the left vote was split with the CCF candidate. A further look by Tulchinsky revealed that “as much as the community loved Salsberg as a person, they detested his communist politics.” [62] Despite the small concentration of Jews living in the Garment District and for the most part sharing the same interests, the Jewish community was fragmented. This is because not only were many workers and union leaders Jewish, but many manufacturers and factory bosses were Jewish as well. The interplay between class-consciousness and ethnicity had an unpredictable way of working out. [63] Sometimes ethnic bonds trumped class-consciousness and this served as a mitigating factor, other times class lines trumped ethnicity and this served as an exacerbating factor. [64] It was not uncommon for working-class Jews to accuse their fellow Jews, who harboured entrepreneurial ambitions and could more accurately be labelled as middle-class, as betraying their ethnic interests or being sell-outs. [65] Conversely, it was not uncommon for middle-class Jews to reprimand the working-class Jews that they were inciting anti-Semitism by their militant resistance to the substantially better living conditions than of those that they experienced in the Old World. [66] Thus much of the vocal resistance against Salsberg’s candidacy came from within the community, perpetuating the fear that if Salsberg won, then Jews would have been labelled as communist supporters, which in the eyes of the greater community was viewed as something deplorable. [67]

Salsberg was eventually elected alderman in 1938 and again in 1943. [68] During his time in public office (both municipal and later in the provincial legislature) he committed himself to fighting for human rights and against discrimination. He was of course still affiliated with the Communist Party, which due to some laws that banned communist activities slightly reformed, but mostly just changed its label to the Labor-Progressive Party. [69] A 1938 Toronto Star article even commended him for his “excellence in council” and went further with a very powerful statement that his “interest in the underprivileged classes… is not communism but humanitarianism.” [70] In 1943, Salsberg was also elected MPP, a tenure that lasted until 1955. He was instrumental in passing several pieces of landmark legislation. [71] Inside the Legislative Assembly, Salsberg was a fierce critic of the government, commenting on its “unchanged pattern of resistance, procrastination, and unenthusiastic yielding to overpowering public pressure.” [72] His first accomplishment was bringing to the attention of Premier George Drew and compelling him to enforce legislation that banned the “publication of discriminatory matter referring to race or creed” [73]. This of course referred to the offensive signs that existed across Toronto, among other places, commonly on beaches that posted messages of segregation such as “only whites allowed.” This eventually culminated in the passing of the Racial Discrimination Act of 1944. [74] But the narrow mandate of this legislation was inadequate and Salsberg continued to fight. In November 1945, a young Black man was refused entry into a skating rink in Toronto on discriminatory principles. [75] His father, Harry Gairey, brought this address to Salsberg because he knew that “the Jews will fight.” [76] This is another example, for better or for worse, of the widespread recognition of the militancy and activism of Jewish culture throughout the twentieth century. In turn, Salsberg brought this to city council and led a demonstration, which on January 1947 culminated in a Toronto by-law that “banned discrimination at public recreation and amusement places.” [77] Salsberg tied in both his interests in tackling anti-Semitism and helping the working-class when he joined the Canadian Jewish Congress’ effort to abolish discrimination in employment. The CJC, an advocacy group representing the interests of Canadian Jewry, was not an ardent fan of communism. But it put its differences aside in favour of mutual interests. [78] Salsberg, being an MPP, even contributed his own draft of an “Act Respecting Fair Employment Practices in Ontario” on April 7, 1948. [79] Although it was not passed presumably, partially for political reasons of not wanting to support an incumbent communist, and partially for legal reasons, it was an important stepping-stone for the eventual 1951 Fair Employment Practices Act. [80]His career in the legislature can be best captured by Tulchinsky’s words: “No records exists of Salsberg mentioning… nor extolling the Soviet Union or communist beliefs… But rather he showed signs of a reformer or progressive… with a genuine concern for the public interest – regardless of party affiliation.” [81]

To understand Salsberg’s final break from communism, it is necessary to examine his life during the Second World War. During the late 1930s, Salsberg was receiving word from his comrades across the pond in the USSR of a gradual resurgence of anti-Semitism. [82] This first started with the dissolution of state sponsorship of all of the Jewish support that the Soviet state was providing since the early years of Lenin, such as the Birobidjan project, and Yiddish cultural institutions that Salsberg valued so much. [83] He secretly travelled to the Soviet Union and met with the leadership to press them for answers. [84] The responses he received were evasive and once he returned to home soil, he brought this up with Tim Buck. Buck was unwilling to support his accusations and before anything could be resolved the war broke out. At that point the CPC leadership agreed that it was best to wait because “the War would settle things.” [85] During the early years of the War, Salsberg again broke from the party over dismay of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of non-aggression that was signed between Soviet Russian and Nazi Germany. [86] However, during this time he kept his peace for the sake of party unity and support for the war effort. [87] In his continued work as a union organizer he strongly opposed striking during this time because manufacturing had to be at maximum capacity for the war. [88] Of course once Hitler broke the pact and invaded the USSR, pushing them to retaliate and join the Allied nations, he laid his concerns to rest, at least for the time being. The immediate post-war years showed some overt signs of alleviation for Soviet Jewry, but it was short-lived. [89] Salsberg continued pressing the CPC leadership to press the Soviet leadership for answers. Eventually in the mid-1950’s, Buck agreed to accompany a delegation with Salsberg to meet with Khrushchev [90]. During this meeting, Khrushchev exposed the full extent of Stalin’s purges, but worst of all he was “unapologetic, justified these actions, and was further evasive on future concerns” so much so that even Tim Buck was forced to admit that, “Khrushchev is an anti-Semite” [91].

On January 9, 1957, Salsberg made his final address and parted ways (resigned on May 6) with the LPP and communism, never to be renewed again. [92] His final message stated that he could no longer support the movement that was so anti-Semitic and autocratic. [93] The failings of the Soviet Union to keep the promise of egalitarianism and even any degree of democracy finally pushed Salsberg over the edge. [94] He did not believe that the LPP could recover due its “history and crippled ability to think independently.” [95] He suggested that the Party be dissolved and a new Social Democratic movement be created, based on domestic needs. [96] Although this seems like a lifetime, Salsberg only peacefully passed away on February 8, 1998. He continued to be very active in the Jewish community for the latter part of his life and gave many interviews that helped provide a window into the events of the twentieth century, marking him as an ever-important figure of history. This essay hardly scratches the surface of the profound ideological journey of a man who, with such conviction, sough out social justice. His only hubris was that he so adamantly stuck to what was working for the moment without considering the greater implications. In hindsight he admitted that when he parted with the Poale Zion movement in the 1920s because of favour for the Soviet Union and what it meant for the future of Jewry that he was wrong. [97] He was, in retrospective, a product of his environment. Ed Hammerstein, another active member at the time, “stressed the radicalizing impact of sweatshop conditions in Toronto – the world situation radicalized people.” [98] On a further note, it is simply impossible to write on Salsberg without reference to Tulchinsky’s uncanny biography, for which he spent a decade writing. But this paper does make something obviously clear. Salsberg’s pursuit of social justice through trying to alleviate the tough living conditions of the working-class and the Jewish community led him to communism. But to simply label him a communist is misleading and ignorant. His political involvement as a union organizer helped many working-class people, Jew and gentile alike, earn better conditions for their work. His legislative involvement assumed a completely democratic process in which he tried to address human rights and discrimination issues. His involvement with communism was strictly dependent on using Jewish welfare as a measure. As a result, he parted several times with the Party. He also opposed Bolshevism and centralized authority because it did not entail a sufficiently democratic and locally adaptive approach. In later interviews, he stated that his experiences caused him to reform his ideology and consider himself a progressive Zionist and social democrat. [99]

References:

[1] Gerald Tulchinsky, Joe Salsberg: A Life of Commitment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 3.

By the 1870s many Torontonians had come to accept the necessity of public ownership of its waterworks. The city’s ratepayers – residents who paid property taxes – had approved the takeover of the city’s drinking water services. Since the system needed high expenditures of capital to expand, private interests could not do the job as affordably as the city could.[1] But many ratepayers also had grave concerns about raising large sums of money by issuing bonds and turning that money over to the Works Department. Ratepayers would ultimately have to pay these debts if politicians were unable to balance the city’s budget. The problem of providing safe drinking water was raised many times by municipal leaders, but voters were often loath to approve large capital projects.

At the turn of the century, newspapers acted as both a mouthpiece for political parties, and as a ‘fourth estate,’ keeping public officials honest by reporting political news of the day.[2] The press told voters to defeat a 1907 plebicite that asked them to approve an expensive trunk sewer project, and was equally vocal in supporting another trunk sewer proposal the following year. Toronto’s medical health officer, Dr. Charles M. Sheard, made use of the Toronto media to win approval for his 1908 trunk sewer plan. Despite opposition from some quarters, ratepayers could be convinced of the necessity of such projects.

This essay builds on the work of Heather MacDougall, Elwood Jones & Douglas McCalla, and especially on a study by Catherine Brace that asked how public health informed the development of Toronto’s sewage infrastructure at this time.[3] It does so by looking at reports in the Toronto daily press in the first decade of the twentieth century. These reports suggest that while public health concerns motivated Dr. Sheard, he won approval for his proposed infrastructure projects by appealing to the economic concerns of business leaders anxious about the harmful effects an unclean harbour could have on trade. Dr. Sheard was instrumental in securing passage of the 1908 trunk sewer by-laws. His success shows that many ratepayers were receptive to arguments for investing in infrastructure to promote public health when these arguments were well articulated, and when they were urged by business leaders and the press to consider them.

The problem of getting Torontonians potable water troubled municipal leaders for more than half a century. In 1841, the city gave exclusive rights to The Toronto Gas Light and Water Company to provide the city with water for drinking and to supply fire hydrants.[4] But the system – and the company that operated it – were never popular with residents of the city. The cost of using the system was too high, and the services provided were deemed too low. Water pressure was sometimes not high enough to feed fire hydrants when they were needed. Even worse, the water was often undrinkable because the pumping station at the foot of Peter Street that drew fresh water from the Toronto Harbour was adjacent to the city’s sewer outflow.[5] In 1872, the City purchased Toronto’s waterworks and ratepayers approved borrowing over a million dollars to expand the system to meet the needs of the growing metropolis.[6] At the time, civic leaders recognized that public ownership of utilities like waterworks was not only acceptable, but might be the only way to provide necessary services.[7] With the purchase of the waterworks, the city was in the business of building and maintaining the Toronto’s infrastructure.

The provision of sewers complicated the city’s obligations to supply clean water. Rate payers exhibited a growing concern for sanitation in the 1870s and 1880s when Toronto’s network of sewers were greatly expanded.[8] Before the existence of regulations that made connecting buildings to sewers mandatory, property owners petitioned City Council to have their block connected to the system and agreed to bear the expense of this work through increased taxes. City Engineer C.H. Rust proudly presented the work being done in Toronto to the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers in 1888.[9] Sewers were being expanded on a voluntary basis across the city. But in 1884, newly elected Mayor Arthur Radcliffe Boswell sounded what was already becoming a familiar refrain:

‘Where does all the filth from these sewers accumulate? In the Bay of Toronto, of which you and I are so proud. Gentlemen, this cannot go on with safety, for our Bay will soon become a cess-pool, and we cannot expect Toronto to retain the character for healthfulness it has hitherto borne if a remedy is not found by which the sewage may be taken elsewhere.’ [10]

Boswell was not the first – nor by any means the last – to call for the construction of an intercepting (or ‘trunk’) sewer to connect the network of sewers and deliver all the waste somewhere more convenient for the residents of the city. Boswell articulated mounting frustration with the system as it existed. Yet he could not offer any practical solution and left office at the end of the year without having made any progress. Two years later, council commissioned a report from City Engineer Charles Spratt and engineers Kivas Tully of Toronto and William McAlpine of New York. Their report recommended building a trunk sewer that would carry waste to a point east of the city and filter it so it would not affect the supply drawn from the lake. The recommendation had the support of the Medical Health Officer of the City, but Toronto taxpayers balked at the $1.4 million pricetag and rejected the plan when it was put to a vote in 1886 and again in 1887. It would be 20 years before civic leaders settled on a plan to deal with the problem once and for all.[11]

Plans to build a new pumping station brought the matter of drinking water before rate-payers in 1904. In March council put the question of borrowing another $1 million for the waterworks to the electorate. The Retail Merchants Association announced it would not support the proposal. According to the RMA’s Municipal Committee, the Works Department had demonstrated its incompetence time and again and taxpayers shouldn’t underwrite such a large sum.[12] Despite this warning from members of the business community, the vote passed. The conservative leaning Evening Telegraph reported that because of low voter turnout ‘a small minority was able to endorse the Works Department and give it a vote of credit for $1,000,000.’ The Telegram lamented that no politician or media outlet had taken the ‘responsible’ course of action to defeat the measure.[13]

The inadequacy of Toronto’s port facilities gave new impetus to efforts to clean up the city’s harbour. In 1905 the city requested funds from the federal government to dredge the harbour to allow larger vessels to anchor there. The government refused, citing the unsanitary state of the water.[14] The water was so filthy according to one commenter, that one could ‘find that your white-painted boat will have a streak on it if you try to cross the Bay.'[15]

The following year, City Engineer Rust presented a plan to end the discharge of sewage into the Toronto Harbour.[16] Rust’s plan would see the construction of a trunk sewer to send waste ‘to the furthest possible point easterly.'[17] By this, Rust meant outside the borders of Toronto, somewhere in the vicinity of the Scarborough Bluffs, where the sewage would once again be discharged into the lake. This point would be distant enough – it was hoped – that it would not threaten the water intake pipe (located by this time on Toronto Island). At some undetermined time in the future it would probably be desirable to filter this sewage rather than send it raw into the lake. In the meantime, Rust maintained, the work on the trunk sewer could begin. Rust estimated that the whole operation could be done for a mere $3 million.[18]

The 1907 ballot thus presented the ratepayers of Toronto with the question of authorizing another large loan. If, as the Telegram had reported, they were not well served by the small minority who had approved the $1 million loan for the apparently incompetent works department in 1904, they would not be fooled twice. Most of the daily papers came out against the plan, reasoning that it was a lot of money to ask for what was an admittedly temporary solution.[19] Only the World stood by embattled Mayor Emerson Coatsworth who had staked part of his political fate on Rust’s plan. But even the World‘s support was tepid. It reprinted verbatim the endorsement of councillors for the by-law,[20] but would not support Coatsworth’s call for the city to print and distribute literature in support of the trunk sewer in the days before the vote.[21]

The Telegram made its position on the 1907 trunk sewer by-law very clear. The Toronto Evening Telegram, December 31, 1906.

Coatswoth and the by-law were both trounced.[22] ‘I am convinced that the trunk sewer was in the interest of the people,’ he said in defeat, ‘but the papers pulled the wool over their eyes. They don’t realize what a grave thing they have done.'[23] But it was not only the papers that were against Coatsworth and the trunk sewer plan.

Well spoken and politically connected, Dr. Charles Sheard had set about transforming Toronto’s Public Health Department in the 1890s.[24] He combined medical knowledge with an ability to persuade audiences and created a public health department that took an active role in the hygiene of individual citizens. His leadership also resulted in renewed efforts to tackle larger environmental problems like that of sewage disposal. But engineer Rust, and public health officer Sheard did not see eye to eye. Sheard claimed credit for defeating Rust’s trunk sewer plan: ‘as a man claiming to have some knowledge of the sanitary needs of a community, and the sanitary rights of adjacent communities…I believe I was instrumental in delaying that project.'[25]

Sheard was the first public health officer in the city committed to germ theory.[26] At the dawn of the twentieth century, medical professionals were beginning to understand how disease was spread. Germ theory replaced and discredited miasma theory. The older theory had held that rotting organic matter spread disease through invisible vapours which could be detected by smell.[27] Proponents of germ theory showed that micro-organisms were the vectors of disease. Yet this idea was more difficult to understand than the more intuitive miasma theory – smell was at least palpable. Microscopic organisms were the domain of expert scientists. Non-experts could only look to the successes of medical professionals who fought epidemic disease, or take them at their word. MacDougall has shown that many residents were happy to do so. According to the Telegam Dr. Sheard’s expert opinion was treated with something approaching reverence.[28]

Toronto was slow to adopt these measures because budget conscious city councillors did not see sufficient commercial benefit in doing so.[29] In England the ‘sanitary idea’ had taken hold in the middle of the nineteenth-century, and had spread to the United States.[30] Sanitation experts applied preventative health techniques like street cleaning and sewage disposal to clean up unhealthy urban environments. While the miasma theory was prevalent, removing waste from the urban environment appeared sufficient. This was the rationale the city followed in 1869 when it merged the board of works with the public health department, partly to save money, and partly because street cleaning and waste removal were the domain of the engineer. Combining these offices meant that other important public health measures like collecting statistics and introducing legislation were ignored.[31] In 1885, the Public Health Officer was once again made a separate and permanent position. Sheard was appointed to this office in 1893.[32]

In 1907, Sheard launched a campaign to promote his own plan for a trunk sewer, a filtration plant for the sewage it collected, and another filtration plant for fresh water being drawn from Lake Ontario.[33] Sheard appeared determined that his plan would not fail because of the ‘ignorance’ of voters as Coatsworth and Rust’s plan had the year before. The success of his plan would depend on a concerted publicity campaign.

Sheard was establishing a reputation for bringing the efficiency of private enterprise to government administration, even as he was criticized by some social reformers for not going far enough.[34] But Sheard knew the support of the business community would be essential if voters were to pass the measure. On October 24 he addressed the Empire Club of Canada, an influential gathering of Toronto’s business and professional elite.

Sheard criticized the plan developed by City Engineer Rust. Rust had been sent to Europe to inspect sewage systems and make recommendations for Toronto. But, as Sheard argued, Rust had decided that ‘in a new country such as this, in a community where it is so difficult to raise the tax-rate for necessary work, [he was] afraid the process [was] too expensive for the City of Toronto.'[35] Sheard insisted that the expense of properly treating drinking water and sewage was justified. He criticized Rusts plan as unambitious and incomplete, and said his own plan would be ‘the beginning and the end of the matter’: a total solution to both the dirty harbour, and the city’s unclean drinking water.

Sheard’s plan would employ the latest techniques to filter the collected sewage of the city. The city would build septic tanks to treat the sewage. Contact beds with bacteria would do most of the work: ‘these bacteria will eat that sewage if you give them time enough, until every vestige of it is gone, until no matter how concentrated the sludge may be, no matter how much solid matter there may be, if you give those bacteria long enough time, they will devour every atom of it and leave the fluid to flow off without them.’ [36] Once treated in this manner, half the sewage would be removed from the waste water, and the rest would be put through another stage of treatment by being filtered through sand and gravel before being deposited into the lake. Sheard promised this process would remove over 90% of the waste material from sewer water.[37] Combined with a filtration plant at the intake pipe, the plan would do everything possible to secure safe drinking water and a clean harbour.

He also pointed to the experience of Hamburg in Germany. Hamburg was one of Europe’s largest ports, and had been subject to disease epidemics arriving from Asia, where much of its trade was conducted.[38] But by 1907 this threat had been dealt with thanks to the introduction of a water filtration plant for the city. Since the German city had dealt with its water problem, ‘Hamburg today has its portals open and its shipping uniterfered with.'[39] Toronto needed to learn from Hamburg’s example if it wanted to thrive as a port.

The following year, Sheard’s project gathered momentum. On May 26, 1908, council endorsed his plan and recommended the question of raising $750,000 for a filtration plant and $2.4 million for a trunk sewer and treatment plant be put to voters.[40] On June 2, he and other experts addressed a large crowd at Victoria College. ‘There is no doubt, no chance, no preadventure about this thing,’ he assured listeners, ‘it has given other cities absolutely pure water, 99 percent and more.'[41] The gathering resolved to ask Toronto’s Board of Control to ‘bring before every property-owner the main facts involved in these questions, so that a large and representative vote may be cast’ in favour of the proposal.[42] Public information sessions were planned for every ward in the lead-up to the June 27 vote.

One such meeting was hosted by the National Council of Women on June 18.[43] At this meeting Dr. J.A. Amyot promised that with this system ‘99.9 percent of all impurity would be removed from the water.’ More importantly, Dr. Amyot argued that filtration was necessary to reduce Toronto’s unacceptably high rate of mortality from typhoid (known to be spread through drinking water). As The Globe reported ‘a few cases [of typhoid] could be traced to milk and to unsanitary environment, but the big majority came from the water supply.'[44] Dr. Amyot concluded with a question: ‘how can you expect the Ottawa Government to improve [the harbour] when you dump just 200 tons of solid matter into it every day all year round? It is nonsense to think of it.'[45] Amyot followed Sheard’s dual line of reasoning: water and sewage filtration was beneficial to health and to the economy.

The newspapers appeared to be as convinced of Sheard’s plan as they had been opposed to Rust’s. Every daily in the city ran editorials in support of the by-law, and the Daily Star ran a banner headline urging voters to support the measure.[46] The Telegram roused its readers with a promise fit for a hollywood blockbuster, ‘if the by-laws carry this will be looked back upon as the day of emancipation from the deadly bacteria.'[47]

The newspapers seem to have played a part in bringing voters to the polls to support the 1908 trunk sewer. The World noted that the number of votes against the by-law were very close to the number that had been been cast to defeat the 1907 by-law.[48] This showed that there remained a large segment of rate-payers who were apparently not convinced by Sheard’s case. The Star quoted one skeptical ‘no’ voter: ‘How are we to know when this is finished but something else will be needed?'[49] But the by-laws passed by a respectable margin of 3196 to 1021 for the sewage plant, and 2889 to 1314 for the water filtration plant[50] indicating that a large number of voters who had stayed away from the polls in January of 1907 had shown up in June of 1908.

After more than 50 years, Toronto finally had a comprehensive plan to protect its drinking water and to treat its waste water. Construction on the trunk sewer, treatment plant, and filtration plant was completed in 1914. But ’emancipation’ from bacteria did not last long. The growing city quickly overwhelmed the capacity of the system. Still, the vote marked a turning point in the determination of the city to deal with sewage and drinking water in a holistic way.

Why did Sheard succeed where Rust had failed? Resistance to capital expenditures on the part of rate payers partly explains the unpopularity of the Rust proposal. But Sheard’s plan was even more elaborate and costly. Why would property owners support the more expensive plan? It appears that the ‘sanitary idea’ had become accepted in Toronto by the turn of the century. Public health officers routinely intervened in the private dwellings of residents to ‘abate nuisances,’ and it was widely accepted that they were right to do so.[51] Part of the unpopularity of Rust’s scheme must also be attributed to its endorsement by the unpopular Mayor Coatsworth. Personality contributed to the viability of any scheme, and the personality of Dr. Sheard appeared to help rather than harm his plans. By endorsing a large scale engineering project like the trunk sewer, medical experts like Dr. Sheard lent the project credibility. This credibility contributed to the success of the 1908 vote. Voters were wary of writing blank cheques to municipal governments, but they only needed to be convinced that they were getting ‘value for money’ to endorse an ambitious plan.

If you find yourself standing on the traffic island at the intersection of Lakeshore Boulevard and Strachan Avenue in Toronto during the morning rush hour, you might be able to snap a picture of hundreds of live pigs making their way through the city (Map A). Animal rights activists call this spot, which has become a regular protest site, “Pig Island,” because when the traffic comes to a crawl in the morning, you can get a close-up look into the dozens of three-level trucks that ship live hogs to the Quality Meat Packers abattoir on Tecumseth Street every day (Map B). According to Toronto Star reporter, Catherine Porter, the trucks sometimes come to a complete stop, allowing photographers to get pictures of the vehicles “sprouting little pink pig snouts.” Shortly after their brief stop at “Pig Island” the hogs arrive at the abattoir where more than 5,000 are killed every day in the second largest pig slaughterhouse in Ontario. [1]

Located near the Liberty Village neighbourhood, a recently gentrified condominium district in downtown Toronto, the Quality Meat Packers abattoir has become a loadstone for animal rights activists and other local protest groups that have struggled for years in their efforts to combat animal cruelty and close the slaughtering facilities. Surrounded by trendy new condos, high-end restaurants, and a popular dog park, the urban abattoir, which first opened in 1914 as the Toronto municipal abattoir, seems to have out-stayed its welcome for many Torontonians, even those who continue to enjoy sizzling strips of bacon at their polished granite breakfast counters on Sunday mornings. The facility assaults the senses of many urban dwellers in the neighbourhood: the sight of hundreds of pigs crowded into the often filthy multi-level trucks; the piercing squeals of the hogs as they struggle under the oppressive heat and humidity of a Toronto summer or the bone-chilling frosts of the winter; the sometimes unbearable stench that is emitted from the meat rending facilities located on site. A pig slaughterhouse embedded within the urban core seems to be an affront to local residents and their ideas and attitudes about the place of domestic animals in the city. Activist groups, including Toronto Pig Save, seek to end what they consider inhumane and cruel processes by which animals are killed in such industrial operations. Ironically, in a city once colloquially referred to as ‘hogtown’ because of its numerous meatpacking facilities, those pigs jostling along Lakeshore Boulevard now seem somehow out of place in Toronto. To some extent, controversy over the Quality Meat Packers abattoir is the result of geography. The urban slaughterhouse brings city dwellers into uncomfortably close proximity to the animals that they kill and consume in a way that Torontonians have not commonly experienced for more than a century.

The relationship between people and domestic animals in Toronto in the early twenty first century stands in sharp contrast to the city of the nineteenth century, a period when humans lived and worked alongside many other animal species. [2] Changes in the uses of domestic animals in cities over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which altered spatial relationships between humans and non-human animals, also influenced perceptions of urban environments. The protests against the Quality Meat Packers abattoir vividly illustrate Annabelle Sabloff’s findings in her study of contemporary urban attitudes toward animals in Toronto in which she argues that ordinary people believe that “nature is where the city is not,” and that animals are alien to urban environments, spaces intended solely for humans. This attitude, of course, was not always common. While Toronto has always been a multi-species environment, inhabited by human and non-human animals alike, cows, horses, pigs, and other domestic animals were once ubiquitous in Toronto’s urban environment, indispensable to the city-building process. Thousands of horses hauled and transported people and goods throughout the city. Cows produced litres of daily milk and other dairy products. Chickens provided eggs and meat for human consumption. And hogs tirelessly gorged themselves on refuse and other forms of marginal feed, enlarging their bodies ultimately to satisfy human appetites. This chapter seeks to take readers through some of the animal spaces of nineteenth-century Toronto, a time when people and domestic animals lived and worked in close proximity to one another in a shared habitat. [3]

Domestic Animal Encounters

Walking through the city of Toronto today an ordinary tourist is unlikely to encounter many domestic animals, other than dogs and cats, the most popular companion animals. The city has very nearly been purged of all live domestic animals used for food or labour, such as cattle and horses. In the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, however, Canadian cities had very substantial populations of livestock animals, roaming streets and lanes, hauling freight, and living in backyard stables. Exploring the history of domestic animals in the city of Toronto in the nineteenth century is, of course, a task circumscribed by the historical record. Animals do not produce written documents and, therefore, knowledge of their histories is limited to documents mediated by human perceptions and interests. The historical record offers only limited traces of the place of animals in the city. Nevertheless, a traveller armed with those records can still find the vestiges of once regular encounters with cows, horses, pigs and other domestic animals on the streets of Toronto.

Historical photography of Toronto reveals the extent to which domestic animals were a significant element of ordinary street landscapes of the nineteenth century. Very rarely the direct subject of photography, horses, dogs, and occasionally cattle were most often peripheral features of cityscape photographs found on the margins of the frame. For example, an 1893 photograph of a horse-drawn water cart on Adelaide Street West barely captured the head of the horse and inadvertently included a small dog running alongside the cart (Figure 1). A photograph of the streetcar that once linked St. Lawrence Market to Woodbine Avenue in 1892 also caught an unassuming cow on film on the far right of the frame (Figure 2).

Figure 1.) A horse-drawn water cart joined by a small dog on York Street looking north from Adelaide Street West, 1893. Source: Toronto Public Library (hereafter TPL) 7-49.

A city engineer in the 1890s, while capturing images of Grand Trunk Railway crossings in the city, also managed to unintentionally immortalize an inconspicuous dog that had been casually standing on the sidewalk along York Street (Figure 3). The almost quotidian or unremarkable character of urban animals in nineteenth-century photography underlines the extent to which Toronto was a multi-species environment in which humans and non- human animals shared space. Encounters with large domestic animals were not uncommon.

Looking east down King Street at Church Street in the 1890s (Map C), Toronto residents would likely have seen a street filled with horses, the city’s most common labour animal (Figure 4). Pulling carts and streetcars throughout the city, Toronto’s horse population was central to urban transportation. Between 1861 and 1894, the street railway system for Toronto was powered by horses that stabled on King Street East (Map D). Soft street pavements, often covered with dirt and manure, were designed to accommodate hooves as much as wheels. According to census data, more than 7,400 horses lived and worked in Toronto by 1891. With such a large population of horses, city council established rules and regulations to guide that traffic in order to avoid street obstructions and to guard public safety. The horse-ridden streets of Toronto could be a dangerous place for pedestrians. City by-laws required all horses to be harnessed and restrained from galloping. City council only permitted police to mount horses on Toronto’s streets. In spite of these regulations, however, it was common for horses to run amok down busy roadways from time to time, sometimes with tragic results. According to Clay McShane and Joel Tarr, in nineteenth-century North American cities “[r]unaways were common and vehicles frequently rolled over in turns.” For example, in February 1894 while visiting Toronto from London, Mary Panton was struck and killed by a horse that “took fright just above College street and kicking itself loose from the wagon dashed down Yonge to Queen”(Map E). The following winter, Constable Gearon of the Toronto Police was said to have saved the day when he managed to stop a team of runaway horses on Parliament Street from trampling several school children that “narrowly escaped injury.” On another occasion in September 1897, a horse drawing a market wagon loaded with fruit and vegetables“ran away on Queen street near Jones Avenue,” colliding with another wagon and“stopping traffic for some time.” Even an afternoon carriage ride in High Park in 1897 could result in tragic injury as when two Toronto women were thrown from their vehicle when their horse bolted and crashed into a railway crossing. [4]

By the end of the century, the horse was still the most common large domestic animal found in Toronto. But city residents had long raised many other species of animals, including cows, pigs, and even sheep, since the incorporation of the city in 1834. According to 1861 census records, city residents kept 59 sheep, 1,102 dairy cattle, and 1,368 pigs in Toronto. Over the remainder of the century, the population of horses and chickens in Toronto rose while cows, pigs, and sheep went into decline. Census enumerators documented the steady growth of chickens in the city, counting 16,714 on city lots in 1891 and 21,226 by 1911, making the chicken the most populous domestic food animal in Toronto by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. Dairy cows, on the other hand, gradually declined from 500 in 1891 to just 29 by 1911. [5]

The transformation of the domestic animal composition of Toronto by the turn of the century illustrates that urbanization was a process of the development of a multi-species habitat rather than the construction of human-exclusive space where livestock husbandry and other processes of agricultural production were driven from the city. This did not occur until later in the twentieth century. Toronto’s urban growth by the turn of the century did not simply displace the practice of animal husbandry to rural hinterlands; it altered these practices within the urban environment and reshaped the composition of domestic animals within the city and its immediate surroundings. Torontonians continued to raise animals and keep them on city lots and dwellings into the twentieth century. While fewer Toronto residents kept dairy cows in the 1910s than they had in the 1860s, more residents instead kept chickens and horses. As Stéphane Castonguay’s study of agriculture on the Montreal Plain from 1850 to 1950 argues, “when we consider the shared elements of the space and exchanges linking city and country, along with the ecology of their production and the dynamics relating to the transformation of their environment, we realize that country is not absent from the city. Rather, it is reinvented, with agricultural and urban environments coexisting side by side.”This was certainly true for livestock husbandry in Toronto. The transformation of the domestic animal population of Toronto, including the decline of dairy cows, sheep, and swine toward the end of the nineteenth century, reflected the effects of crowding, the industrialization of animal slaughter and meatpacking, and the difficulty of keeping large animals in confined spaces. In response, Toronto residents changed their patterns of livestock husbandry, focusing more on horses and chickens while continuing the practice of sharing space within the urban environment with domestic animals. As such, even into the early decades of the twentieth century, encounters with domestic animals on the streets of Toronto were far more common than they are today. [6]

Order and Animals

Just to the southeast of the former location of the Toronto Street Railway stables at the intersection of Sumach Street and Eastern Avenue was the site of one of three municipal pounds in the 1890s (Map F) where city pound-keepers held Toronto’s delinquent animals. While standing at this intersection today one would be hard-pressed to find any livestock animals at all, this site once held many hundreds of cows, pigs, horses, and other stray animals that wandered the city across property boundaries. Because urban dwellers shared space with so many different domestic animals in nineteenth-century Toronto, the city council used a series of municipal by-laws to regulate and manage the interactions between humans and non- human animals in the city.

Such efforts to manage the domestic animal population through regulation pre-date the incorporation of Toronto in 1834. Continuous Euro-American settlement at the site of present-day Toronto began in the summer of 1793 with the establishment of the town of York as a defence outpost along the north shore of Lake Ontario. Founded by the first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe, York was soon selected as the colonial capital by December 1793. Within four years, the population of this town grew to 241. York developed a small network of streets and buildings clustered along the lakeshore, with a population of about 625 people by 1813. Those few hundred human settlers at the town of York kept a variety of domestic animals and practiced a form of free-range animal husbandry, allowing their livestock to forage unattended throughout the town. Occasionally the presence of free-roaming domestic livestock within a growing, dense human settlement led to conflict. For example, a York resident outlined one such instance in an 1811 letter to the York Gazette in which he described the practice of retributive livestock mutilation in the town:“If a latent desire of revenge is cherished towards any person who may own cattle, by some miscreant whose mind is rendered callous by the indulgence of vicious inclinations, or if an[y] horse or cow may happen to stray on the premises of those whose breasts are devoid of feeling; the poor animal, whose only desire is the gratifying his appetite, feels the effects of their brutal rage.” The troubled York inhabitant recounted a startling case of two horses that were “accustomed to run on the Commons here,” but were found “cut in a most shocking manner with an axe, knife, or some other sharp instrument.” York residents also came into conflict over pigs found in the streets. Many town-dwellers in York considered swine to be nuisances and obstructions. These animals were often the subject of petitions and complaints to local magistrates. In May 1812, the Clerk of the Peace for the Home District publicly warned that“The owners of Swine are also cautioned against allowing them to run at large in the said Town or neighbourhood after the date hereof, otherwise prompt measures will be taken to prevent such trespassing.” [7]

Conflict over free-roaming animals persisted even after the city was formally incorporated in 1834 as both human and non-human populations of the city grew. Domestic animals were so ubiquitous within the emerging urban environment that they immediately fell under the regulatory control of the municipal government following the incorporation of the City of Toronto in 1834. In fact, the regulation of domestic animals was so central a component of early municipal governance in Upper Canada that the provision granting this authority in the act of incorporation for Toronto appeared on the first page of the legislation. The act of incorporation granted the newly formed common council for the City of Toronto the power “to regulate or restrain Cattle, Horses, Sheep, Goats, Swine and other animals, Geese or other poultry, from running at large within the limits of the said City of Liberties thereof; and to prevent and regulate the running at large of Dogs.” Furthermore, it permitted the council to prevent riding of horses or driving of cattle on sidewalks. There were even some animal cruelty prevention provisions within the city’s act of incorporation which empowered the council “to prevent the excessive beating or other inhuman treatment of horses, cattle, or other beasts, in the Public Highways.” Non- human animals were indirectly regulated through a number of different municipal powers, which granted the council control over other aspects of the urban environment, including fishing, public markets, roads and streets, and public health. From the outset, through a broad range of powers, the municipal government in Toronto held extensive regulatory authority to mediate the interactions between people and animals. [8]

Complaints over trespass and property damage continued to be a problem for residents of the former town of York into the 1830s. The first city council for Toronto attempted to respond to these complaints by establishing nuisance and pound by-laws to restrain the practice of animal husbandry in the city in order to regulate property relations and bring order to the streets and sidewalks. Toronto’s nuisance and pound by-laws did not seek to entirely exclude non-human domestic animals from the urban environment. Instead, they created legitimate space within the city’s regulatory framework to accommodate the presence of horses, cattle, pigs, chickens, and other animals that lived and worked in the city.

The council passed its first nuisance by-law in May 1834, in part to respond to the urgent need to regulate the use of domestic animals within the urban environment. Section III of the first nuisance by-law for the City of Toronto stipulated that “no swine shall be permitted to run or be at large in any of the streets or any of the sidewalks of this city.” The by-law imposed fines for such offences, and the city appointed a man named Issac White as the first pound-keeper for Toronto to enforce the prohibition on free-running pigs. But within a year’s time the by-law seemed to be largely ineffective at controlling Toronto’s swine population. A group of city residents forwarded a petition to the council in August 1835 complaining of stray pigs roaming freely throughout Toronto, calling upon the council “to enforce the City Ordinances against Swine running at large within the City.” Such complaints continued into 1836, finally compelling the city council to address the problem. James S. Small, one of the councillors for St. David Ward, led the effort to place stricter municipal controls over domestic animals in Toronto. In 1836, he drafted and introduced a new dog licensing system which required dog owners to collar and tag their animals. Small, along with other councillors, also pressed for the passage of a more comprehensive pound by-law to limit free-range animal husbandry in Toronto. [9]

Recognizing that its previous efforts to control free-running pigs were “ineffectual,” the city council passed its first pound by-law in October 1837, empowering pound-keepers and all city constables to capture and impound any “Horses, Oxen, Bulls, Sheep, and Swine that shall be running at large within the said City.” Furthermore, the by-law granted authority to the city pound-keepers to capture any animals found trespassing on “the land of any person or persons having enclosed the same by a good and lawful fence.” The pound by-law sought to protect stationary property from free-roaming animals, a form of mobile property. [10]

If you found yourself anywhere in the city north of Queen Street, east of Parliament Street or west of Peter Street in the 1840s, you still might have come across free-roaming cows (Map). While the first pound by-law prohibited certain animals from roaming unattended in Toronto, cattle were excluded from this prohibition. The council still permitted the free-range grazing of cattle in Toronto outside of private property boundaries and city streets and alleys. Unoccupied lots and other spaces in Toronto remained permissible grazing territory within the early urban environment of the city. In 1840, however, the city council began to set limits on this practice, gradually constraining the geographic space for the grazing of cattle. The by-law itself noted that “great inconvenience is experienced in the City from the number of Horned cattle that are allowed to run at large about the principal Streets.” In particular, the council was concerned about the crowding of such animals near the city’s hay market and weigh house where farmers from outside Toronto would bring their animals for sale at the public markets (Figure 5). The by-law granted the pound-keeper the authority to impound any cow found running at large between Peter Street and Berkeley Street, south of Queen Street. Just five years later, those boundaries expanded further west to Parliament Street. [11]

By the late 1850s, the city council had set further constraints on Toronto’s free-running cattle, making it more difficult to keep such animals in the city. In 1858, amendments to the municipal pound by-law established three city pounds and enclosed the remainder of the space within the city limits for free-range animal husbandry. The amendments in By-law 260 required city pound-keepers to capture any “Horses, Oxen, Bulls, Horned Cattle, Sheep, Goats, and Swine that shall be found running or straying at large on the Streets of said City,” except for those “being driven from or to pasture by their owners, servants or Agents.” This exception was finally eliminated in 1876 when all free-range animal husbandry was entirely banned in Toronto. [12]

Buying and Eating Animals

To the west of the former site of the Eastern Avenue pound along King Street is St. Lawrence Hall (Map G), site of the original St. Lawrence Market building, which is now south of Front Street. The colonial government of Upper Canada first designated the site as the market block for the town of York in 1803 where a small wooden building was constructed to accommodate the town’s first public market. This structure was later replaced by a brick building in 1831 and became the first city hall for Toronto in 1834. Today’s St. Lawrence Market building (Map H), where city residents and tourists now gather to purchase cheese, bread, meats, vegetables, and other fresh groceries, was built in 1968 to replace the brick building north of Front Street, which had once been the centre of the commercial and political life of Toronto in the nineteenth century. It was also one of the primary places where Torontonians bought and sold live animals in the city.

In addition to constraining the movement of domestic animals in the city in the nineteenth century through by-law regulations, Toronto’s city council also sought to control the sale and slaughter of such animals. In May 1834, the city council passed By-law 2, “An act to regulate the Public Markets” establishing rules and regulations for public market houses, butchers, and other retailers of agricultural produce, governing the bodies of domestic animals as part of the urban food supply. While this by-law was intended to regulate trade in fresh foods, particularly meats, it was also designed to guard public health and to a lesser extent animal health. To ensure that the supply of meats to urban consumers fell under the watch of the city market clerk and health inspectors, the by-law stipulated that “Market Houses shall be the only places for selling meat.” This provided a controlled market for butchers and a source of revenue through license fees for the city, but it also permitted a degree of quality control to prevent the sale of “any unwholesome, stale, emaciated, blown, stuffed, tainted, putrid or measly pork, meat, poultry, or other provision.” Toronto had eventually established three public market houses by the 1860s, including the St. Lawrence Market, St. Andrew Market, and St. Patrick Market (Map H, J). The city market clerk required butchers to keep their stalls “in a clean and sweet state,” and their tables “clean and free from filth or dirt.” Live animals, under this first public market by-law, could be sold at public markets, but they were to be kept out of the interior of market buildings and clear from all exterior sidewalks and other walkways. One year later, an amendment to the public market by-law restricted authority for the slaughtering of live animals within the city limits to licensed butchers. [13]

Subsequent amendments to the public market by-law for Toronto loosened municipal control over domestic animals in the urban food supply while still attempting to protect both human and animal health. In 1851, the city council liberalized its animal slaughter regulations, permitting the establishment of slaughterhouses outside of the public market buildings so long as they were kept “in such a manner as shall prevent nuisances to the adjoining premises or neighbourhood, and that no offal or impurity shall be allowed to remain in or near such slaughter house.” These new slaughterhouses were subject to inspection by city health officers at least once every two weeks. Prohibition of the sale of meats outside of the public markets in private butcher shops was finally lifted in the summer of 1858 when butchers could operate shops outside of a five-hundred-yard radius from any public market building. The effects of this change in the regulation of butcher shops were very quickly realized. For example, in 1880, the city directory listed one hundred sixty-five shops located outside of the public markets (Figure 6). The geographic distribution of butcher shops in Toronto reveals that these shops spread with the growth of the city along major streets and street railway lines (Figure 7). This change in the regulation of butcher shops reflected changing retail consumer demand as Torontonians sought places to purchase meats closer to their homes. These new butcher shops were still subject to all licensing and inspection provisions of the public market by-law, however, and the requirement to keep shops “in a clean and proper state.” [14]

In 1858, the sale of large live animals at the public market was restricted to “Calves, Sheep and Swine which may be in a farmer’s wagon properly secured from being or running at large.” The city council established cattle markets for horses, cattle, and other larger domestic animals on the vacant lots adjacent to St. Andrew’s Market in the city’s west end and south of the St. Lawrence Market (Map H, I). Following the creation of the cattle markets, the council amended the public market by-law to ensure that no animals “brought into the City for Sale shall be sold in any of the Public Streets or other place in the said City before they have been at the Cattle Market and the said fees have been paid thereon.” Furthermore, to protect these animals and consumers, the by-law required sellers to fasten their animals to the market stalls “to secure them from being injured by any of the other animals or doing injury to any person or to each other.” While rudimentary, these early market by-laws provided the first regulations to manage the public health challenges associated with the sale and distribution of meats and live domestic animals in Toronto. [15]

Map of Toronto showing major street railway routes and butcher shop locations to 1880. Source:W.C. Chewett & Co., City of Toronto: Compiled from Surveys made to the present date, 1866.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century it became less common for Torontonians to purchase live domestic animals at public markets for slaughter and consumption. Instead, urban consumers increasingly turned to retail grocers who sold cut and packaged meats from large industrial meatpacking facilities. One of the earliest and most prominent examples of such operations was the William Davies & Company, Toronto Pork Packing Establishment. Davies, an English immigrant, started his provisions busi- ness in Toronto in 1857 and eventually expanded to develop one of the city’s first large-scale slaughter and meatpacking facilities near Front Street East and the Don River (Map K). The enormous two-acre operation was located directly adjacent to the Grand Trunk Railway lines, which delivered live hogs for slaughter. In 1886, with state-of-the-art machinery, including special scraping and singeing machines to remove bristles from the pigs, the company killed and processed about 75,000 hogs into cured meats in a single year. William Davies & Company was one of many industrial meat- packing businesses to operate in Toronto in the late nineteenth century, establishing the ‘hogtown’ reputation for the city. In 1892, a large portion of the company was sold to Joseph Flavelle, a prominent provisions merchant who eventually took over as managing director, expanding the company’s slaughtering capacity to nearly a half million hogs per year by 1900. [16]

Small slaughterhouse facilities, which had expanded throughout the nineteenth century, eventually went into decline and drew attention from city officials over public health concerns, which inspired the decision of the city council to build and operate a municipal abattoir in 1914. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, city health inspectors had found live cattle and other animals to be living in squalid conditions at the various small slaughterhouses in Toronto (Figure 8). The Board of Health recommended that the city operate its own large-scale public industrial slaughtering facilities in order to guarantee the safety of the meat supply for Toronto residents. The City of Toronto operated its own abattoir from 1914 to 1959 before selling the facilities to private operators (Figure 9). Today the former municipal abattoir is operated by Quality Meat Packers, one of five federally regulated animal slaughtering facilities located within Toronto.

City health department photograph of a pig at an old slaughterhouse, 1914. Source: CTA, fonds 200, series 372, subseries 32, item 346.

Toronto municipal abattoir, 1916. Source: CTA, fonds 1231, item 513.

Conclusion

By the end of the nineteenth century, the composition of domestic animals and their geographic distribution in Toronto had changed. For a time, city residents continued to raise horses and chickens in increasing numbers while fewer people kept cows, pigs, and sheep. One could still purchase live animals at the public markets, but it was increasingly more common for such animals to be slaughtered, processed, and repackaged for sale in large industrial meatpacking facilities. The electrification of the street railway system in 1894 and the adoption of automobiles by the 1920s and 1930s eventually made horses far less common sights on major city streets.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Toronto and other Canadian cities underwent a homogenization of the legitimate uses of domestic animals in urban environments. These processes of transformation occurred over many decades as humans gradually extirpated domestic labour and food animals from cities. By the mid-twentieth century, the most common domestic animals in Toronto were companion animals, particularly dogs and cats. The everyday encounters between humans and domestic animals on city streets and sidewalks became far less common than in the nineteenth century. Instead of passing horses, cattle, and pigs, Torontonians by the beginning of the twenty-first century were more likely to encounter the city’s growing population of wild animals, which now includes pigeons, seagulls, coyotes, foxes, skunks, squirrels, and raccoons. The homogenization of experiences with domestic animals altered human perceptions of urban space and the role of animals in cities. Humans no longer lived and worked in such intimate proximity to domestic livestock animals, used for food and labour, and they eventually came to see these uses as inappropriate in the city.

Standing on Pig Island watching thousands of live hogs roll past now seems out of place in Toronto. Livestock husbandry in the city is almost totally unknown. In recent years, groups within the city have attempted to amend municipal by-law regulations to once again permit residents to raise chickens in Toronto. While this urban chicken movement has experienced success in other Canadian cities, including Vancouver, Victoria, and Guelph, Toronto’s city council has yet to welcome chickens into the backyards of its neighbourhoods. During one debate, Toronto Councillor Frances Nunziata told urban chicken advocates that “[i]f you want to have chickens, then buy a farm, go to a farm.” Her blunt response to proposals to permit city residents to keep backyard hens underlines the contemporary perception that domestic animals and people should not share space within the urban environment. It speaks to the discomfort that many Torontonians have with the domestic animals that continue to inhabit the city, including the thousands of pigs killed and processed in the Quality Meat Packers abattoir. Some are disturbed by industrial slaughtering processes, which are in part responsible for the increasing segregation of humans and domestic animals. The restricted use of domestic animals as pets in cities and prohibitions on livestock husbandry have limited human perceptions of urban environments, reinforcing the idea that cities are places devoid of nature and exclusively intended for human use, rather than habitable environments for humans and non-human creatures alike. [18]

[2] In this article, I use the term “domestic animal” to refer to species of animals that have been tamed, bred in captivity, and whose phenotypic characteristics are dependent upon artificial selection. As such, this chapter also recognizes that the domestication of animals is both a biological and cultural process, particularly the cultural distinction of domestic animals as property as described in Nerissa Russel, “The Wild Side of Animal Domestication” Society & Animals 10 (3) 2002: 285-302.

[3] Annabelle Sabloff, Reordering the Natural World: Humans and Animals in the City (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) 7.

[4] Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Census of Canada, 1890-91, Vol. 4 (Ottawa: 1897), 174; City of Toronto Archives (hereafter CTA), By-law 4, “An Act concerning Nuisances and the good Government of the City” 30 May 1834; Clay McShane and Joel Tarr, Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 91; Toronto Star, 17 February 1894, 8; 6 February 1895, 4; 30 September 1897, 2; 11 August 1897, 4.

[7] G.P. de T. Glazebrook, The Story of Toronto (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 13; Edith Firth, ed., The Town of York, 1793-1815: A Collection of Documents of Early Toronto (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1962), lxxvii; “Mutilation of Livestock” York Gazette, 31 August 1811 in The Town of York, 1793-1815, 105; “Public Nuisances and Swine” York Gazette, 1 May 1812 in The Town of York, 1793-1815, 108.

[8] “An act to extend the Limits of the Town of York; to erect the said Town into a City; and to Incorporate it under the name of the City of Toronto,” 6 March 1834, Statutes of His Majesty’s province of Upper Canada (Toronto: G. Tiffany, 1834) 73; 81.

[9] City of Toronto Archives (hereafter CTA). By-law 4, “An Act concerning Nuisances and the good Government of the City” 30 May 1834; CTA. Journal of the Common Councilof the City of Toronto, 1834, 24 August 1835; 21 April 1836; 10 August 1836; 5 December 1836; CTA. By-law 23, “An Act the more effectually to provide for the collecting the Tax imposed on Dogs and to provide for their Destruction in certain Cases” 27 May 1836.

[10] CTA. By-law 32, “An Act to establish a Pound and appoint one or more Pound Keepers for the City of Toronto” 6 October 1837.

[11] CTA. By-law 44, “An Act to restrain Horned Cattle from running at large in certain portions of the City” 20 May 1840; By-law 101,“An Act to reduce into on Act the several Laws now in force regulating Pounds” 8 December 1845.

[12] CTA. By-law 260, “An Act to provide more effectually for preventing Cattle, Horses, Swine &c from running at large within the City and Liberties” 14 June 1858; By-law 474, “A By-law to provide for the appointment of Pound-keepers, and to regulate the Pounds in the City of Toronto” 25 September 1876, A Second Consolidation of the By-Laws of the City of Toronto (Toronto: Hunter, Rose & Company, 1876).

[13] CTA. By-law 2, “An act to regulate the Public Markets,” 27 May 1834; By-law 10, “An act to regulate the Public Market and to repeal an Act of the same Title,” 8 May 1835.

[14] CTA, By-law 173, “An act to amend the law relating to the Public Markets of the City of Toronto” 12 September 1851; By-law 263, “An act to regulate the Public Markets of the City of Toronto,” 13 July 1858.

[15] CTA. By-law 273, “To regulate the Public Markets of the City of Toronto” 21 February 1859; By-law 313, “Respecting the Public Markets and Weigh Houses” 22 March 1860.